EDITOR’S PREFACE.

Passeron and the epistemology of the social sciences.

Introduction.

Aside from just a few articles published in English translation in journals, this is the first major

publication in English of a substantial work by Jean-Claude Passeron. His name is familiar to

English-speaking sociologists as a result of his collaboration in the 1960s with Pierre Bourdieu –

especially as a consequence of his co-authorship of The Inheritors (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1964,

[1979]) and of Reproduction in education, society and culture (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1970,

[1977]. It may be known that Bourdieu and Passeron ceased to collaborate at about 1972, but

few people are aware of Passeron‟s research and writing after that date whereas many people

know well the numerous texts produced by Bourdieu in the following thirty years until his death

in 2002, especially in the translations into English published mainly by Polity Press during that

period and still now issued posthumously. Bourdieu‟s international reputation is a fact. The

intention of this production now of a translation of Passeron‟s Le raisonnement sociologique is

to enable readers to begin to appreciate the significance of his independent intellectual

achievement. Given the level of Bourdieu‟s international recognition, this introduction to

Passeron‟s work inevitably proceeds in part by suggesting comparison between the work of the

two men. Given that this Preface introduces French work to an English-speaking readership, it

is doubly comparative in that it seeks to compare the divergent intellectual production of

Passeron and Bourdieu within the common context of the French field of production and to

compare that field with the field of English-speaking reception.

In both cases, however, „comparison‟ is not the right word to cover the task which is required.

An initial examination of an early co-authored article by Bourdieu and Passeron will clarify in

what sense this preface is comparative and, in doing so, it will take us to the heart of the

differentiation between the positions of the two men. The Preface is then divided into three

parts. The first part tries to locate the common project of Bourdieu and Passeron within

competing Western European traditions of the philosophy of social science. The second part

discusses the breakdown of co-operation between Passeron and Bourdieu at the end of the 1960s

and early 1970s and sketches the subsequent development of Passeron‟s career. The second part

contextualises the production of the first and second editions of Le raisonnement sociologique in

1991 and 2006 whilst the third part summarises the text of Sociological Reasoning in order to

highlight for consideration some key points of difference between the approaches of Passeron

and Bourdieu. There is a sense in which Passeron represented himself, either implicitly or

explicitly, in relation to Bourdieu precisely so as to reinforce the main contention by which he

distinguished himself – that there can be differences of intellectual and artistic production in

spite of similarities of social trajectory, that the sociologies of art and knowledge cannot be

„reduced‟ to the sociologies of the position-taking of producers as social agents. The discussion

which follows seeks to indicate the way in which this attempt to represent the work of Passeron

and Bourdieu comparatively itself reflects the differences of thinking about comparative

methodology which exposed the deeper differences which divided them.

In 1967, Robert Castel and Jean-Claude Passeron edited a series of studies in a book entitled

Education, Développement et Démocratie. The published studies were selected from papers

given at two conferences organised by the Centre de Sociologie Européenne (the research group

established by Raymond Aron in 1960 for which he appointed Bourdieu as secretary whilst at

the same time appointing Passeron to be his research assistant at the Sorbonne). Most of the

selected studies were based on papers given at a conference held in Madrid in October, 1964, or

at the sequel held in Dubrovnik in October, 1965. The 1964 conference was organised in

association with the University of Madrid and entitled: “La formation des hommes et le

développement économique” [manpower training and economic development]. There were

about 20 papers representing contributions from 10 countries. The 1965 conference was

organised in association with sociological research groups in Zagreb and Belgrade and entitled:

“Systèmes sociaux en milieu rural et systèmes d‟éducation dans les pays méditerranéens”

[social systems in rural environments and systems of education in Mediterranean countries].

There were 23 papers given by sociologists, economists and statisticians from eight countries.

Although the intention of the conferences was that the relationship between systems of

education and economic development should be examined, Castel and Passeron indicate in their

Foreword that it had emerged in debate that the sociology of education retained autonomy in

relation to the sociology of development such that the publication would confine itself to the

consideration of competing systems of education. They anticipated that there would be further

publications focussing on current research projects in rural and economic sociology but, as far as

I am aware, these never transpired. Education, Développement et Démocratie contained

contributions from, and about, Algeria, Spain, France, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Arab states, and

Yugoslavia. These were representative of diverse and volatile social and political situations –

Algeria of post-colonialism; Spain under the dictatorship of Franco; France under de Gaulle;

Greece after the „apostasis‟ of July, 1965 and prior to the seizure of power by the „colonels‟;

Hungary under renewed soviet oppression after the uprising of 1956 and the assassination of

Nagy in 1958; the Italy of rural Sardinia; the „Arab states‟ (Morocco, Egypt, Kuwait) as code for

Islamist control; and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia under Tito as prime minister

and then President. The conferences clearly sought to explore empirically the issues which Aron

had outlined theoretically after his appointment as Professor of Sociology at the Sorbonne in

19551. His main interests were products of the Cold War period. In 1956 he wrote a chapter on

“The Soviet Economy” in a book entitled “The Future of Freedom” which was based on a

conference held the previous year in Milan by the Congress for Cultural Freedom (funded by the

C.I.A). The third of his series of lectures at the Sorbonne (of 1957-8) was published in 1965 as

Démocratie et totalitarisme [Democracy and totalitarianism]. Aron was particularly interested

in exploring whether economic behaviour operates in accordance with its own rules

independently of socio-political context or whether types of economic activity are contingent on

types of context, in short, in exploring whether economic behaviour is an independent variable

in respect of competing systems of political governance, whether there are necessary affinities

between market economies and liberal democracies on the one hand and command economies

and totalitarian states on the other. Although Aron believed that there were no grounds for

complacency about the operation of liberal democracies and that they should be kept under

constant observation, it is clear that he was opposed to the central state management of

communist regimes. It is equally clear that his young researchers were disposed to find

attractive the Yugoslav management of its affiliation to the communist bloc2. The Introduction

to Education, Développement et Démocratie consists of a short preface by Castel and Passeron,

followed by a methodological chapter, co-authored by Passeron and Bourdieu, entitled: “La

comparabilité des systèmes d‟enseignement” [the comparability of systems of education].

Bourdieu and Passeron had already published Les Héritiers in 1964, which had been the product

of several years of research on a sample of French undergraduates and in which they had argued

that the discrimination against working-class students that was manifest in recruitment was

reinforced after matriculation by the extent to which the curriculum tested prior knowledge

(„capital‟) already possessed by privileged students. They had already found the French

educational system to be democratically deficient. The two transnational conferences provided

the opportunity to test the democratic potential of educational systems managed under different

political regimes. Castel and Passeron accordingly began their preface in the following way:

“If the sociological and statistical analysis of the inequality of educational opportunity in

liberal economies, situated at different levels of economic development, illustrates the

multiplicity of the dimensions of cultural inequality by exposing, for instance, how much

this inequality is linked to the economic inequality which it helps to legitimise and, by

that means, to perpetuate, the sociology of education in socialist countries offers the

opportunity for a particularly pertinent counter-test [contre-épreuve].” (Castel &

Passeron, 1967, 13)

They proceeded to elaborate what they meant by this „counter-test‟. In socialist societies,

understood,

“In the absence of most of the economic determinants of educational inequality which

obtain in capitalist societies, the properly cultural determinants of cultural inheritance

are, in effect, isolated in a quasi-experimental fashion.” (Castel & Passeron, 1967, 13).

It was left to Bourdieu and Passeron to explore further the methodological implications of this

„quasi-experimentation‟ in their chapter which, I suspect, would have been written for the

publication rather than for the conferences. They begin by noting that in the last twenty years

(i.e. post World War II) the traditionally humanist way of reflecting about education has been

superceded by evaluation in terms of its economic function. This criterion of evaluation has

been deployed by decision-makers to judge the efficiency of educational systems for meeting the

„needs‟ of advanced industrial societies. It also facilitates the assessment of educational systems

relative to the stages of development of different states. This form of what Bourdieu and

Passeron call „decisional comparability‟ tacitly adheres to an evolutionary model of social

change whereby different social systems and their educational components are placed at

different points on an universally valid scale. They argue that the prevalence of this criterion

should be treated as the object of sociological enquiry as much as „the principle of an exhaustive

questioning of the system of education‟ (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1967a, 21). The application of

this criterion abstracts a measurement of the efficiency of systems from the cultural

particularities within which they exist. Such a method of analysis only secures comparability „at

the cost of a mutilation of the realities compared‟. (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1967a, 22). The

application of this form of analysis is based on a technocratic commitment to the formal

rationality of social systems and seeks to impose this norm through its process of inspection.

The requirements of „decisional comparability‟ „lead to a privileging and an abstracting from

their contexts of those elements which are susceptible to measurement‟. (Bourdieu & Passeron,

1967a, 31).

Bourdieu and Passeron argue that educational systems are particularly not amenable to

universalist evaluation because, more than other social systems, they fulfil a function of cultural

conservation and have an intimate relationship with the past of their national cultures. They cite

Durkheim‟s argument in L’évolution pédagogique en France that most of the characteristics of

French universities can only be understood in the light of the distant history of the institution.

This causes them to ask whether the only alternative to economistic comparative assessment is

one which „reduces the specificity of the system of education simply to the specificity of the

national culture‟. (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1967a, 33). What Bourdieu and Passeron call

„culturalist‟ analysis, mainly associated with „cultural anthropology‟, leads to a resigned

acceptance of incomparability. It is „condemned to a double reduction since it must find the

values of a culture in its system of education and, contradictorily, recognize the effect of

educational action in the most characteristic and most diverse traits of the culture‟ (Bourdieu &

Passeron, 1967a, 32). Comparative analysis of educational systems in terms of the cultures

within which they are situated rather than in terms of an abstractly imposed yardstick in the end

only offers as explanation a re-statement of the explicandum, that which is to be explained.

They identify this culturalism with „touristic ethnology‟ which randomly identifies homologies

between educational and cultural practices on the basis of superficial observation and anecdotal

evidence.

To break the impasse between opposing decisional and culturalist analyses, between what they

also call „abstract comparativism‟ and „intuitionist idiography‟ (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1967a,

38), Bourdieu and Passeron argue that we must „grasp the specific logic of the educational

system and examine the relations which it has with other systems‟ (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1967a,

34). They attempted to spell out the meaning of this third option in a section entitled “From the

specificity of the system to the specification of functions”. The essence of this third option is

that, prior to any comparison, particular educational systems should be analysed rigorously, both

in their diachronic relationship to their historical origins and in their synchronic relationship to

other social sub-systems. This approach would not lead simply to the articulation of different

particularities but would suggest possibilities for international comparison emerging out of the

case-studies rather than imposed on them a priori in the comparative process. Their

recommendation was that by this means it would be possible to develop „a typology, still

abstract but founded on the position and the concrete functions of systems of education within

social systems‟ (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1967a, 46).

The discussion of comparative method in this article reflects other articles which Bourdieu and

Passeron were writing at the time, both jointly and singly. In 1966, Bourdieu had published both

“Condition de classe et position de classe” [class condition and class position] (Bourdieu,

1966a) and “Champ intellectuel et projet créateur” (Bourdieu, 1966b, [1971]) [intellectual field

and creative project]. In the former, he had argued that „conditions‟, such as those of peasants,

cannot be abstracted and compared across cultures but can only meaningfully be understood by

analysing relationally such „positions‟ within their particular network of social relations. In the

latter, he had argued that artistic or intellectual productions are to be understood only within the

social networks of production and reception which give them meaning rather than by reference

to the subjective intentions of autonomous creators. In 1966, Passeron had contributed the

second part of La réforme de l’Université (Antoine & Passeron, 1966) entitled “Conservatisme

et novation à l‟université « [conservation and innovation in the university] in which he

suggested that the success of reforms proposed in a prime ministerial decree of that year would

be dependent on a proper appreciation of the enduring structural and attitudinal legacies of the

reform of the university system effected in France between 1880 and 1886. They argued for the

necessity of understanding social phenomena relationally, both historically and in terms of intra-

systemic contemporary relations. In 1967, they co-authored “Sociology and Philosophy in

France since 1945: Death and Resurrection of a Philosophy without Subject” (Bourdieu &

Passeron, 1967b) in which they applied this relational thinking to their own „positions‟ (not

„conditions‟ as „intellectuals‟) within French society as it had developed historically since the

Liberation.

“Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1945” points the way to my transference of the

methodological options discussed by Bourdieu and Passeron in their joint contribution to

Education, Développement et Démocratie in respect of systems of education from that context

to the context of application in respect of the „comparative‟ analysis of the work of intellectuals

(specifically here Bourdieu and Passeron) within the French intellectual and institutional

tradition and cross-culturally between national traditions. Indeed, it is said that, shortly before

Bourdieu‟s death in 2002, there was a personal reconciliation between Bourdieu and Passeron in

which they talked about the possibility that they might co-author a sequel to the original essay in

which they would reflect on Sociology and Philosophy in France since 1967. It never

materialised, but this Preface might constitute a partial surrogate. The important point for our

purposes is that cracks were already apparent in the common front adopted by Bourdieu and

Passeron in 1966/67. Bourdieu‟s “Condition de classe et position de classe” was simultaneously

an attack on cross-cultural analysis of the kind practised by Lévi-Strauss and on the supposed

trans-cultural validity of Marxist concepts of socio-economically determined class condition.

The corollary of Bourdieu‟s rejection of these equivalents of „decisional comparability‟ was that

he claimed that class „positions‟ are the consequence of the position-taking activities of

individuals operating within the parameters prescribed for them by their conditional habitus.

Although Bourdieu‟s articles of 1966 were criticisms of „structuralism‟, he was, nevertheless,

prepared to admit that it had served a purpose by discrediting spontaneous ethnography. The

first sentence of Bourdieu‟s “Structuralism and Theory of Sociological Knowledge” (Bourdieu,

1968) is explicit about this. Structuralism had enabled the emergence of a scientific cultural

anthropology. It begins to become clear, therefore, that Bourdieu was in the process of seeking

to deploy the third option of comparability outlined with Passeron in Education, Développement,

et Démocratie to legitimise as science the culturalist option which they had there rejected as

merely intuitive. From this followed Bourdieu‟s reversal of his structuralist “La maison kabyle

ou le monde renversé” (Bourdieu, 1970, [1970]) in Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique

(Bourdieu, 1972, [1977]) where he offered the „structure‟ of the kabyle house as the product of

the immanent constructivism of participating social agents - disclosed heuristically by the

application of the objectivistically structuralist assumptions of cosmopolitan observers.

Bourdieu‟s move did not convince Passeron. He remained committed to the third option

involving the production of a sociological semiology of systems and sub-systems as sign

languages. Passeron was not persuaded that Bourdieu‟s transfer of system sensitivity to all

social agents avoided the deficiency of the culturalist option. To seek to analyse the social and

cultural value judgements of agents in terms of their social position-taking without regard to the

autonomous values inherent in the chosen objects, as Bourdieu was to do in La distinction

(Bourdieu, 1979, [1986]), was, for Passeron, to fall into the culturalist trap. Bourdieu‟s solution

appeared to be a device to deploy sociology to legitimise intuition whilst evading the question of

the epistemological status of sociological explanation. It was also a device which contributed to

the enactment of his own theory. The logic of Bourdieu‟s position – which he pursued – was

that the conceptual framework which he had devised to explain the strategic actions of others as

they modified their inherited habitus was itself the product of his own social trajectory. There

was a strong ontological undercurrent in Bourdieu‟s thinking which became increasingly

apparent as an intellectually expressed challenge to intellectualism and rationality. A text such

as “La spécificité du champ scientifique et les conditions sociales du progrès de la raison » [The

specificity of the scientific field and the social conditions of the progress of reason] (Bourdieu,

1975, [1975] reflects a philosophical scepticism about rationality which he may have derived

from Husserl‟s Crisis of European Sciences or from his early reading of Hume, and which

persisted through to “Sur les ruses de la raison impérialiste” [On the Cunning of Imperialist

Reason] (Bourdieu, 1998, [1999]). By contrast, Passeron resisted the denigration of rationality.

There was a superficial similarity in their common opposition to idealist Reason, but Passeron

remained committed to practical reasoning and to the struggle to define the characteristics of

reasoning intrinsic to different scientific discourses. Passeron was not enticed by ontology away

from epistemology. I now examine in general terms (in Part I) the national systems of the

epistemology of the social sciences which provide the context for this differentiation of Passeron

from Bourdieu within the French context and for our cross-cultural reception of their work. Part

II continues to elaborate that differentiation by special reference to Le métier de sociologue.

Part II indicates that Passeron and Bourdieu shared a remarkably similar social trajectory and

Part III tries to suggest through close reference to Le raisonnement sociologique that Passeron‟s

tacit disagreements with Bourdieu themselves constituted „quasi-experimental‟ „counter-tests‟

which demonstrated the unsatisfactoriness of the attempt to reduce cultural allegiance to social

position. The explanation for their differences, for Passeron, derives from the alternative

systems of thought which they deployed. As will be clear from Sociological Reasoning,

Passeron thought significantly with, amongst others, Spinoza, Weber, Pareto, Prieto, Carnap,

Russell‟s preface to Wittgenstein‟s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, C.S. Peirce, Popper

(negatively), whereas, by contrast, Bourdieu thought significantly with, amongst others, Leibniz,

Durkheim, Husserl, Cassirer, Panofsky, Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein‟s Logical Investigations.

With minimal variations within a shared French culture, it was the alternative modes of

reasoning introduced by these different influences which generated their divergences. Passeron

was sensitive to the influence of logical systems. Bourdieu would, perhaps, see the nature of the

competition between intellectual „influences‟ in terms of „the problem of relevance‟ articulated

phenomenologically by Alfred Schutz. What caused Passeron to read Carnap and Bourdieu to

read Cassirer? If we could answer this question, we might possibly be able decide whether we

should read Bourdieu or Passeron. In the absence of an answer, we should read both.

Part I.

‘Pre-disciplinary’ social science and philosophical truth.

Jane Austen began Pride and Prejudice, written in 1796/7 and first published in 1813, with the

famous sentence: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a

good fortune must be in want of a wife” (Austen, 1939, 1). This statement functioned in the

novel in that it immediately established the framework for the attitudes which would be the

assumed backcloth for all the actions of its characters. But what kind of statement is it, taken as

a „real-life‟ comment? Does it suppose that it articulates a truth which happens to be universally

acknowledged or is it the claim that it is universally acknowledged which establishes its

veracity? Are there independent criteria of truth such that there may be truths which are not

universally acknowledged? If the universality of acknowledgement is thought to constitute the

criterion of truth, how universal is universal in relation to social behaviour? What kind of

evidence is required to verify or falsify the claim of universal acknowledgement? Is the „truth‟

of the comment beside the point? Is the main emphasis that the statement is an assertion, a

proposition, which accurately reflects shared assumptions and which is pragmatically effective

in reinforcing those assumptions?

Of course, to dissect Jane Austen‟s sentence in this way begs the prior question concerning the

nature of the relationship between discourse offered within a „fictional‟ construct and in the

context of a set of imaginatively constituted events and actions and comparable „realities‟ of

language and action. It is worth pursuing these questions therefore in relation to a contemporary

text of „social science‟ – Malthus‟s An Essay on the Principle of Population, first published in

1798. Malthus had studied mathematics, science, and the classics at Jesus College, Cambridge,

and had become the curate of a Church of England chapel in Surrey. In his Preface, Malthus

indicated that he was impelled to write his book following a conversation with a friend on an

essay by William Godwin on avarice and profusion. The discussion had raised „the general

question of the future improvement of society‟. Godwin was a „perfectibilist‟ but, in Malthus‟s

view, Godwin‟s philosophical optimism was undermined factually by the imbalance between the

rate of increase in population growth and the growth in the capacity to generate the means of

sustenance. Like the narrator of Pride and Prejudice, Malthus had his certainty: “It is an

obvious truth, which has been taken notice of by many writers, that population must always be

kept down to the level of the means of subsistence; …” (Malthus, 2008, 3). But Malthus had

another certainty. “It is an acknowledged truth in philosophy”, he wrote, “that a just theory will

always be confirmed by experiment” (Malthus, 2008, 11). Although this is a truth in principle,

he immediately contended that it was not one which could be operationalised: “Yet so much

friction, and so many minute circumstances occur in practice, which it is next to impossible for

the most enlarged and penetrating mind to foresee, that on few subjects can any theory be

pronounced just, that has not stood the test of experience. But an untried theory cannot fairly be

advanced as probable, much less as just, till all the arguments against it have been maturely

weighed, and clearly and consistently refuted.” (Malthus, 2008, 11). In other words, he was

prepared to contend that the confirmation of just theories empirically is impractical and that they

can only be advanced if they survive a process of refutation by argument. The consequence was

that he offered his book as an exploration of the arguments, for and against, in respect of two

„postulata‟: “First, That food is necessary to the existence of man, Secondly, That the passion

between the sexes is necessary, and will remain nearly in its present state.” These were two

„fixed laws of our nature‟. The „postulata‟ – the questions posed – were refined mathematically

by reference to cursory and spurious empirical evidence:

“Assuming, then, my postula as granted, I say, that the power of population is

indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.

Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence

increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the

immensity of the first power in comparison of the second.” (Malthus, 2008, 13)

This process of thinking was the foundation of Malthus‟s argument in An Essay on the Principle

of Population. On the basis of this a priori mathematization of social reality, Malthus came to

be regarded as one of the pioneers of „political economy‟.

Coleridge‟s judgement (in a marginal note written in 1804 on the 2nd edition of 1803) of

Malthus‟s book was that it was „350 pages to prove an axiom!‟ Coleridge‟s contention, in other

words, was that Malthus‟s book was misconceived and worthless because it purported to

demonstrate empirically something which was a logical proposition. However, he immediately

followed up this first comment with another in which he elaborated the view that the book had

taken up so much space only „To illustrate a self-evident Truth!‟ (quoted in the Introduction to

Malthus, 2008, xx). This apparent reiteration of his criticism, however, introduces a new

dimension. It is not just that Malthus wrongly attempted to prove an axiomatic proposition.

There is also the assumption that the logically necessary statement represents something which

is self-evidently „true‟. What is at stake is the relative status of logic or experience in

determining truth.

‘Post-critical’ Kantian thought and the German university.

During the second half of the 18th

Century, Immanuel Kant, in Königsberg, had been wrestling

with this question (and it is probable that Coleridge was already aware of this). In his early

career, Kant had lectured and written on problems in contemporary physics, attempting to

disentangle what could be said on the basis of empirical investigation from what seemed to

follow logically from world-views devised systematically to co-ordinate natural science with

theology. His Dreams of a Spirit-Seer of 1766 had been a satirical attempt to expose the

groundless fantasies of Swedenborg‟s metaphysical belief system, subjecting its claims to

rational scrutiny. This had preceded the period in which he developed his „critical‟ philosophy

in which he explored the limits of rational and empirical enquiry and the necessary correlations

between the two in advancing knowledge. His orientation was to argue that we cannot derive

from experience those categories of thought which we deploy to seek to understand it. Kant

sought to reconcile the „empiricist‟ and „rationalist‟ traditions of Western European thought by

arguing that knowledge advances through encounters between intrinsic mental capacities and

extrinsic sensations rather than exclusively as a consequence of one or the other. At the end of

the century, as an old man, Kant published two books which had profound consequences for the

subsequent endeavour scientifically to understand human behaviour in society. His The Conflict

of the Faculties and his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View were both published in

1798. The first was a vigorous rationale for the institutional existence of a Faculty of

Philosophy within the university. The argument was that the faculty of Philosophy provided the

social space within which positions advanced dogmatically within the three dominant faculties –

of Theology, Law, and Medicine – could be rationally challenged. For the purposes of his

argument, Kant accepted that it was legitimate for the three other faculties dogmatically to

transmit the knowledge required of professionals in the various services of the state, but he

insisted that it was also legitimate and in the interest of the state to sponsor a faculty with a

critical function vis-à-vis the claims of other discourses. In effect, Kant was seeking to

institutionalise his „critical‟ philosophy by advocating a „critical‟ faculty3. The second book was

the culmination of thinking about human science which had commenced in his pre-critical

period and continued beyond the critical phase. In his „Introduction‟, Kant justified his specific

title in the following way:

“Physiological knowledge of man aims at the investigation of what Nature makes of

man, whereas pragmatic knowledge of man aims at what man makes, can, or should

make of himself as a freely acting being.” (Kant, 1996, 3)

Unlike „natural‟ science, „human‟ science (anthropology) involves the participatory

understanding of the world which humans inter-subjectively construct. It was, however, the

essence of the critique of Kant‟s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View which Michel

Foucault submitted as his second doctoral thesis in 19644 that the inter-subjectivity which Kant

seemed to recommend was predicated on the conception of the self which had informed his

critical writing. The nature of the pragmatic knowledge exchange was predetermined by the

non-pragmatic, a priori assumptions of Kant‟s earlier thinking.

The consequences of the effects of these two texts became apparent in the development of

Geisteswissenschaften [sciences of the mind] and Kulturwissenschaften [sciences of culture] in

German universities throughout the 19th

Century. In the settlement of the Treaty of Tilsit of

1807, Prussia lost the territory which had contained the influential university at Halle. Plans

were immediately made to establish a new university in Berlin and there was sophisticated

debate about what should be the nature and function of the new institution. Those most involved

in the debate were a younger generation of post-Kantian philosophers, notably Schelling, Fichte,

Schleiermacher, von Humboldt and Hegel. These transformed the Kantian notion of a critical

faculty within the university. The post-Kantians undermined Kant‟s commitment to rationality

and emphasized, instead, the primacy of identity, either of the self or of the state, discovered

through historical and cultural research. Their influence contributed to the consolidation of an

ideology of a liberal university which, as a total institution, performed the critical function for

society which Kant had only envisaged for philosophy within the institution. It was this ethos

which dominated throughout the 19th

Century in Prussia and generated German historical and

cultural scholarship. At the end of the 19th

Century, it generated the hermeneutic philosophy of

social science which we associate with Dilthey, Simmel and Weber. The consequence of the

effects of the two Kantian texts in combination was that the university was conceived of as

offering a context within which the pragmatically exchanged understandings of men in society

were vicariously articulated by an institutionally endorsed elite of social scientists. The

university provided the institutional space either for the cultivation of thought independently of

socio-political context or for the articulation in social detachment of an objective understanding

of the subjective meanings of the actions of agents in society. The „value-freedom‟ of social

scientific explanation celebrated by Weber was a methodological creed that was based on an

assumed dichotomy, reinforced institutionally, between rational judgement and experience.

Disengaged English logic.

The development of the thinking of the young John Stuart Mill is symptomatic, in England, of a

comparable separation of speculative philosophy from empirical enquiry. When, in the 1820s,

J.S. Mill rejected the materialist associationism which his father and Jeremy Bentham had

imbibed from David Hartley, he began to formulate a „system of logic‟. He attempted to deploy

associationism to establish a non-idealist logic, but the nature of that logic only concealed the

formal intent which was to identify principles of ratiocination which would regulate a priori

processes of argumentation and enquiry. His A System of Logic (1843) was almost the first of a

sequence of 19th

century English texts on logic. These initially included Richard Whately‟s

Elements of Logic (1826) and Sir William Hamilton‟s “Logic: The Recent English Treatises on

the Subject” (1833) - to both of which Mill responded – but, later, included George Boole‟s The

Mathematical Analysis of Logic (1847), De Morgan‟s Formal Logic (1849), W.S. Jevons‟s Pure

Logic (1864), J.Venn‟s Symbolic Logic (1881), and Lewis Carroll‟s Symbolic Logic (1896).

This development of thought about Logic was dominated by mathematicians, but there was an

alternative tradition which had an affinity with the idealist philosophy which was dominant at

Oxford and which reinforced the liberal ideology of the university developed there by Jowett,

Pattison and others and articulated, approximately, by J.H. Newman in his The Idea of a

University. This „new logic‟, announced by Mansel in his Prolegomena Logica (1851), opposed

Mill‟s attempted dissociation of logic from thought as well as the mathematical abstractions of

the formal logicians. Mansel sought to reclaim the study of logic for philosophy by arguing that

it should concern itself with judgement. In this respect he was a precursor of the later English

idealists – Bradley and Bosanquet.

Comte’s positivist agenda.

Partly as a result of his reading of the work of Auguste Comte, Mill wrote a final book (VI) of

his A System of Logic entitled “On the logic of the moral sciences” which considered questions

such as “To what scientific type the Science of Human Nature corresponds” or “Are Social

Phenomena a subject of Science?”. These were attempts to legislate philosophically and a-

historically about social scientific enquiries and findings. Comte (like Mill) was not a university

professor. He had been trained as an engineer and he embarked on an analysis of the

contemporary state of knowledge on the assumption that intellectual and socio-political

developments contributed in tandem to historical progress. The defining characteristic of the

new intellectual would be that he would participate in social change and that his analyses would

be instruments for effecting change rather than detached observations. Published in six volumes

between 1830 and 1842, Comte‟s Cours de Philosophie Positive sought to demonstrate how the

development of the sciences culminated in the coincidence of positive social science and the

social engineering of a new, post-monarchical form of social organization5.

Comte had been trained at the Ecole Polytechnique which had been founded under the

Convention in 1794/5. The 22 universities which had previously existed in France before 1789

were abolished by the Revolution. The 1795 Convention had placed education under local

control, but, instead, Napoleon established the Imperial University. By this was meant the entire

system of administrators and teachers at primary, secondary and tertiary levels, all employed and

supervised by the state. The Imperial monopoly was essentially a mechanism of surveillance

whereby the state could keep control over the activities of the Church. The elements of the

former universities were fragmented into independent „faculties‟ which were designed to

provide professional training. The Ecole Polytechnique was abolished briefly at the restoration

of the Bourbon monarchy in 1816 as a result of its known allegiance to Napoleon.

Subsequently, Comte associated himself with the Saint-Simonian social reformers before

pursuing an independent career during the successive anti-republican regimes of the next 50

years. It was at another institution founded in the revolutionary period and encouraged by

Napoleon – the Ecole Normale Supérieure – that, after his death, Comte‟s positivist thinking

converged with the disposition of a new generation to overthrow monarchical or imperial

government and establish, in 1871, a Third Republic. It was not until 1896 that French

universities were re-established. This was the year in which Emile Durkheim delivered the first

university course in sociology at the University of Bordeaux. As a student at the Ecole Normale

Supérieure in the first half of the 1880s, Durkheim had imbibed the post-Comtist positivist

orientation of thought, but he was also influenced by Kantian philosophy, as mediated by

Renouvier and Boutroux. He, and his contemporary Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, spent time at German

universities. They admired German achievements in science and technology but did not absorb

the idealist ideology of the university. Two of Durkheim‟s earliest works – Les Règles de la

méthode sociologique (1895) and Le Suicide: étude de sociologie (1897) – were attempts to

advance the practice of social scientific research rather than to contribute philosophically to the

epistemology of social science. The intention was that the communication of social scientific

methodology would be instrumental in realising the social goals of the republican state. This

was very different from the view that social scientific knowledge transmitted in liberal

universities would provide a forum for the criticism of state influence. The Durkheimian

orientation was pragmatist rather than idealist.

Philosophy of science and philosophical scientists.

In Germany, the „return to Kant‟ at the end of the 19th

Century gave rise to competing „neo-

Kantianisms‟ – based either at the university of Marburg (Cohen, Natorp, and, then, Cassirer) or

the university of Heidelberg (Rickert and Windelband) – which sustained academically

philosophical consideration of the epistemology of the sciences. In France, however, the

institutional context for intellectual production must have contributed to the rise of philosophical

enquiry on the part of practising scientists. Claude Bernard was an important pioneer. He made

significant advances in the field of physiology and, late in his career, produced his reflections on

his practice in his Introduction à l’étude de la médicine expérimentale, published in 1865. His

example was followed at the turn of the century by Henri Poincaré and Pierre Duhem., both

mathematical physicists. Poincaré published La Science et l’Hypothèse in 1902. After works on

mechanics and statics, Duhem published La théorie physique: son objet et sa structure in 1906.

In the same spirit as Durkheim‟s Règles, these were philosophical attempts at self-regulation

independent of the jurisdiction of autonomous Philosophy. This was a spirit which was

sustained during the first half of the 20th

Century in France by figures such as Gaston Bachelard

and Georges Canguilhem, both of whom began their careers as mathematicians and scientists.

There was a reaction in the 1920s against the immersion of thought in practice – expressed, for

instance in Julien Benda‟s La Trahison des Clercs (1929) and exemplified in the willingness of

some of Durkheim‟s disciples (Bouglé, Fauconnet, and Davy) to collude posthumously in the

assimilation of their master‟s project to university Philosophy6 – but even the vogue for Hegel

stimulated by the work of Jean Hyppolite did not instate academic detachment. Lévy-Bruhl‟s

fin-de siècle history of 19th

Century French Philosophy had celebrated the way in which

Durkheimian thought had exorcised the legacy of „eclecticism‟ and pioneered a new way of

philosophising. Academic philosophers such as Martial Guéroult, Jules Vuillemin, and Henri

Gouhier regarded the history or social history of philosophy as an intrinsically philosophical

activity. Between the Wars, the Ecole Normale Supérieure became heavily committed to

Marxist thinking and, as the member of staff there responsible for preparing students for the

agrégation from 1950 to 1980, Louis Althusser early stated his objection to any academic

diminution of the radical consequences of Marxist/Hegelian thinking in his “Le retour à Hegel”

(1950), significantly sub-titled: “Dernier mot du révisionnisme universitaire”.

The spatial autonomy of logical positivism.

Nothing could more clearly indicate the difference between the dominant attitudes towards

Philosophy in England and France than the opening lines of Bertrand Russell‟s book of 1900 on

Leibniz. At about the same time, Louis Couturat in France was advancing an idealist

interpretation of Leibniz (La Logique de Leibniz, 1901) and, in Germany, Ernst Cassirer a neo-

Kantian one (Leibniz’ System in seinen wissenschaftlichen Grundlagen, 1902). In France in

1934, Guéroult would publish his socio-historical study: Leibniz, Dynamique et métaphysique.

By contrast to these approaches to the work of Leibniz, Russell boldly announced:

“Questions concerning the influence of the times or of other philosophers, concerning the

growth of a philosopher‟s system, and the causes which suggested his leading ideas – all

these are truly historical: they require for their answer a considerable knowledge of the

prevailing education, of the public to whom it was necessary to appeal, and of the

scientific and political events of the period in question. But it may be doubted how far

the topics dealt with in works where these elements predominate can be called properly

philosophical. ... Philosophic truth and falsehood, in short, rather than historical fact, are

what primarily demand our attention in this inquiry”. (Russell, 1900, v, vi)

In David Pears‟s view, Russell amalgamated the legacies of Hume and Mill in order to effect the

„reconstruction of empirical knowledge‟. His „logical atomism‟ was a revision of empiricism

and, as Pears comments, “As for the Idealists, he never could accept their notion that the objects

of knowledge are really all inside human minds” (Pears, 1972, 23). In spite of Russell‟s

opposition to idealism, it was G.E. Moore who was most responsible for toppling Oxford

Idealism from its pedestal. His “The Refutation of Idealism” (Moore, 1903) was, according to

Passmore, “the first example of that minute philosophical procedure … which was to be

Moore‟s distinctive philosophical style, exercising, as such, a notable influence on his

successors, particularly at Cambridge” (Passmore, 1966, 207). Whereas Russell was concerned

with denotation or referentiality and was, therefore, able to publish a book in 1914 entitled Our

Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy, Moore‟s

„common sense‟ linguistic philosophy was self-referential. He wrote in “An Autobiography”,

published in 1942, that

“I do not think that the world or the sciences would ever have suggested to me any

philosophical problems. What has suggested philosophical problems to me is things

which other philosophers have said about the world or the sciences” (Schilpp, ed., 1942,

14, quoted in Gellner, 1968, 66).

The successful Cambridge usurpation of Oxford philosophical dominance was consolidated by

Wittgenstein‟s occasional association with Cambridge until his death in 1951. After military

service, the only philosophical book which Wittgenstein published in his lifetime – the Tractatus

Logico-Philosophicus – appeared in German in 1921 and in English translation, with an

introduction by Russell, in 1922. Wittgenstein spent most of the 1920s in Austria where

unsuccessful attempts were made to draw him into the coterie of the „Vienna circle‟, but he

returned to Cambridge in 1929, registered for a PhD, examined by Russell and Moore, was

elected to a 5-year fellowship at Trinity College (Russell‟s college), and succeeded Moore as

Professor of Philosophy in 1939. The war intervened, but he lectured in Cambridge in 1945/6

and 1946/7 before retiring at the end of 1947 to live in Ireland, where he wrote Philosophical

Investigations, published posthumously in 1953. In discussing Wittgenstein‟s influence,

Grayling comments that typescript copies of some of his writings circulated in his lifetime with

the result that traces of his ideas “can be detected in the work of Gilbert Ryle, J.L. Austin, and

certain others” (Grayling, 1988, 114), but he rejects the suggestion that “so-called „Ordinary

Language Philosophy‟, which flourished at Oxford mainly during the 1950s” (Grayling, 1988,

114) was primarily the consequence of Wittgensteinian influence.

In the published text of lectures which he gave in 1987, Michael Dummett has argued that what

generically distinguishes „analytical philosophy‟, which has come to be synonymous with

„anglo-saxon‟ philosophy, is that “Widely as they differed from one another, the logical

positivists, Wittgenstein in all phases of his career, Oxford „ordinary language‟ philosophy and

post-Carnapian philosophy in the United States as represented by Quine and Davidson all

adhered to … twin axioms”. (Dummett, 1993, 4). These were:

“… first, that a philosophical account of thought can be attained through a philosophical

account of language, and, secondly, that a comprehensive account can only be so

attained.” (Dummett, 1993, 4).

This specification introduces Dummett‟s account of the origins of analytical philosophy, but his

remarks in his Preface make it clear that his brilliantly lucid book is written from within the

assumptions that he analyses. After the manner of G.E. Moore, Dummett states that “… I have

tried to attend to those causal influences which appear to operate in the realm of ideas

independently of who reads what or hears what, …” (Dummett, 1993, viii). The extent to which

the historiography of this philosophical tradition has been philosophically self-affirming is

striking, as evidenced, for instance, by the texts of Pears and Grayling already cited, and Ayer on

Russell (1972). A dramatically alternative account of the „anglo-saxon‟ tradition of analytic

philosophy was provided by Ernest Gellner in his Words and Things, which was published in

1959 when he was a member of the department of Social anthropology at the London School of

Economics. Not only did this book attempt a philosophical rebuttal (endorsed by an

introduction written by Bertrand Russell), but it also hinted rather crudely at a sociological

analysis of the philosophical phenomenon. Within the analytical tradition, Peter Winch had

tried to situate the claims of social science philosophically with his The Idea of the Social

Sciences (1951) but, in opposition, Gellner explicitly inserted into English debate the tension

which was endemic in French discussion. Chapter IX was entitled „Sociology‟ and its first

section was devoted to „Philosophy and sociology‟ which he introduced with the comment that

“It is unfortunately not customary to include sketches of the social background and

consequences of philosophies in expositions of them” (Gellner, 1968, 254). He proceeded to

offer a scathing attack on linguistic philosophy at Oxford, suggesting that it “provided a

philosophic form eminently suitable for gentlemen” (Gellner, 1968, 264) and that it was a kind

of populism but that “The folk whose simple but sound folk-culture is being defended and

preserved against corruption by specious, theoretical philosophy are the folk of North Oxford,

roughly.” (Gellner, 1968, 265). For Gellner, Linguistic Philosophy was an exclusive ideology

which sustained itself organizationally by emphasizing communication through esoteric

discussion groups and tutorials. The nature of the philosophy was homologuous with the self-

perpetuating privilege of the institution within which it flourished. The goal was to consolidate

a restricted epistemic community. The Oxford philosophers contented themselves “with

criticizing each other, and in general it is the limit of their mission to do something acceptable to

their colleagues.” (Gellner, 1968, 272).

The nuanced differences between exponents of what Gellner labels as Linguistic Philosophy are

clarified in Passmore‟s account of „a hundred years of philosophy‟, first published in 1957 and

significantly amended in 1966. Such a book exposes the philosophical crudity of Gellner‟s

critique but, at the same time, it provides evidence to support Gellner‟s more general distrust of

autonomous philosophizing. Passmore discusses intellectual movements within a conceptual

framework which recognizes, but gives subordinate attention to, the trans-national migration of

ideas and assigns no weight to the institutional contexts within which ideas are developed and

disseminated. Thus Passmore‟s consideration of the work of Popper is mainly confined to seven

pages of a chapter, entitled “Logic, Semantics and Methodology” (chapter 17) which treats the

development of symbolic logic, examining the work of Tarski, Carnap, and, in England, Ogden

and Richards. Popper‟s Logik der Forschung was published in Vienna in 1934, but he sought

refuge from the Nazis initially in New Zealand (1937-1945) before coming to England in 1946

with the result that a book which, prior to A.J. Ayer‟s English adaptation of Viennese logical

positivism in Language, Truth and Logic of 1936, had already offered a critique of that

movement, had, instead, a delayed impact when it was published in English in 1959 as The

Logic of Scientific Discovery – in the same year as Gellner‟s Words and Things. Popper had

written his two volume The Open Society and Its Enemies, published in 1945, whilst he was in

New Zealand, but, on reaching England, as Magee puts it: “… neither Oxford nor Cambridge

wanted him as a Professor”. (Magee, 1973, 13). Instead, “… he spent the last 23 years of his

university career at the London School of Economics, where he became Professor of Logic and

Scientific Method.” (Magee, 1973, 13). From this institutional base, Popper wrote The Poverty

of Historicism (1957) and Conjectures and Refutations (1963) and made his department a centre

of opposition to the domination of „Oxbridge‟ linguistic philosophy. Nevertheless, it is

significant that Gellner barely refers to Popper in Words and Things. The explanation is that

Popper‟s philosophy of scientific method remained within an idealist tradition, asserting that

„theory guides us to observations‟ (Passmore, 1968, 409) and rejecting the reverse assumption

of empiricism as practised in the human sciences. As such, the Popperian critique of Linguistic

Philosophy had nothing in common with the sociological critique of idealist philosophy which

was an essential component of the French situation. Within the London School of Economics,

the Popperian philosophy of method was as unengaged with the practice of sociology and

anthropology in the same institution as was Oxbridge philosophy.

A seminal text of the analytical tradition was published by the young A.J. Ayer in 1936 as

Language, Truth and Logic. His Preface was crystal clear:

“The views which are put forward in this treatise derive from the doctrines of Bertrand

Russell and Wittgenstein, which are themselves the logical outcome of the empiricism of

Berkeley and David Hume. Like Hume, I divide all genuine propositions into two

classes: those which, in his terminology, concern „relations of ideas‟, and those which

concern „matters of fact‟. The former class comprises the a priori propositions of logic

and pure mathematics, and these I allow to be necessary and certain only because they

are analytic. That is, I maintain that the reason why these propositions cannot be

confuted in experience is that they do not make any assertion about the empirical world,

but simply record our determination to use symbols in a certain fashion. Propositions

concerning empirical matters of fact, on the other hand, I hold to be hypotheses, which

can be probable but never certain. And in giving an account of the method of their

validation I claim also to have explained the nature of truth.” (Ayer, 2001, 9)

This represented a rejection of the metaphysical associations of the tradition of formal logic,

clarifying terminology in relation to the scrutiny of ideas and facts, but in doing so it retained a

function for the philosopher – someone capable of adjudicating in abstract about the method

adopted for the validation of empirical matters of fact without reference to different kinds of

fact. Ayer acknowledged that he was in closest agreement with the Vienna circle. Whereas,

however, Language, Truth and Logic became absorbed in England into the self-referential

tradition of academic analytic philosophy, the work of the Vienna circle itself took place within

a significantly different intellectual and socio-political context. In 1924 and 1925 Carnap

attended the seminars of Edmund Husserl before becoming associated with Moritz Schlick at the

University of Vienna. Carnap published The Logical Construction of the World [Der logische

Aufbau der Welt] in 1928. Working at the same time in Vienna on a phenomenological revision

of Max Weber‟s interpretative sociology, Alfred Schutz published, in 1932, his Der sinnhafte

Aufbau der sozialen Welt, subsequently published in translation in 1964 as The Phenomenology

of the Social World. Equally, working on the fringes of the Vienna circle, Popper published his

Logik der Forschung in Vienna in 1934. Partly as a result of the conjunction of the influences of

Weber and Husserl, there was, in the Austro-German context, an interest that was not present in

England, in the practice of social science in relation to the logic of social science explanation. It

was in the same decade, that the Institut für Sozialforschung was established at Frankfurt and,

from Marxist origins, a „critical‟ theory of social science emerged in the work of Max

Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno.

The migration of ideas and institutional assumptions from Europe to the United States,

and the post-War return.

The migration of intellectuals happened in stages – from Germany in 1933/4, and later from

Austria and France in 1939/40. A partial account has been given by H. Stuart Hughes in his The

Sea Change. The migration of social thought, 1930-1965. Taking his cue from the analysis of

academic alienation in Germany provided by Fritz Ringer in his The Decline of the German

Mandarins: the German Academic Community, 1890-1933 (1969), Hughes argued:

“As the purveyors of Geist, German writers and professors had claimed the status of „a

priestly caste‟ legislating „ultimate values to a peasant population‟. In the 1930s, despite

the buffeting it had received in the world of reality, this claim was still confidently

advanced: even some of those who regarded themselves as cultural revolutionaries –

men like Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse – remained

sufficiently close to the teachings of Hegel to find no inconsistency in such a stance. The

„abstract language of cultivation‟ was the common coin of German men of letters.”

(Hughes, 1975, 20, quoting Ringer, 1969, 268).

Hughes focussed substantially on the Frankfurt School in exile, concentrating on the relationship

between Adorno‟s intellectual development and his spatial movement – from Oxford and

London in the early 1930s to Columbia University in 1938 and back to Frankfurt in 1948 – but

the same point could be made about other émigrés – Karl Mannheim and Karl Popper, for

instance, to the United Kingdom. Alfred Schutz migrated to New York in 1939 after a year in

Paris. Aron Gurwitsch, born in Lithuania, left Germany in 1933, taught in Paris for the rest of

the decade before fleeing to the United States in 1940, where he remained until his death in

1970. Gurwitsch‟s The Field of Consciousness (1964) was, nevertheless, first written in French

and published as Théorie du champ de la conscience in 1957. As is clear from their published

correspondence (see Grathoff, ed., 1989), both tried to assimilate the thought of Husserl to the

indigenous American tradition of pragmatic philosophy derived from William James. Although

they analysed the social construction of the social world or contributed to the development of a

phenomenology of everyday life, they did so from an intellectual stance which remained

philosophically detached. Georges Gurvitch, born in Novorossiysk, was both Professor at the

University of Strasbourg and director of the French Sociological Institute, Ecole Libre, New

York, when, in 1945, he co-edited, with Wilbert E. Moore, a summary of world sociology,

published as Twentieth Century Sociology. On returning to France, to the Sorbonne, he directed

and made major contributions to a collective Traité de Sociologie, published by Presses

Universitaires de France. Jean Stoetzel was French-born and a normalien, but he developed

expertise on opinion research in the United States in the late 1940s before returning to France

subsequently to hold the chair in Social Psychology at the Sorbonne from 1955 to 1978. Claude

Lévi-Strauss, born in Belgium and a normalien, held a post as Professor of Sociology in Brazil

from 1934 before moving to New York to the New School of Social Research in 1941 and then

returning to Paris to the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in 1948 and on to the Chair of Social

Anthropology at the Collège de France, Paris, in 1958. It was Lévi-Strauss who gave the account

of „French sociology‟ in the 1945 collection co-edited by Gurvitch and Moore. Raymond Aron,

born in France and a normalien, taught in Cologne for a while in the early 1930s, spent the war

years in London, and, after a decade in journalism back in France, was appointed to the Chair of

Sociology at the Sorbonne in 1955, moving on to the chair of Sociology at the Collège de

France, Paris, in 1970.

The list could go on. My point is that most of the intellectuals holding dominant positions in the

French social sciences by the end of the 1950s had either experienced German academicism

directly in the 1930s or had encountered it in its diasporic form in New York. Of diverse

national origins and, in some cases, stateless citizens, they sought to transform local German

idealism into a transcendent philosophy of social science which euphemised dissociation from

immediate socio-political conditions. In France, the return of the cosmopolitan intellectuals

after 1945 consolidated the rupture „épistémologique‟ with the tradition of the Third republic

which had been effected by the Vichy regime. The zenith of the post-war repossession of

German intellectuality by the returning pre-war generation was the famous „positivist dispute in

German Sociology‟ which commenced at a conference of the German Sociological Association

on the logic of the social sciences held at Tübingen in October, 1961. Popper gave an opening

paper to which Adorno replied. After almost a decade of revision and editing, a text was

published in 1969, edited and introduced by Adorno, which was published in English in 1976 as

The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology. The year after the conference, the young Ralf

Dahrendorf published an article entitled „Remarks on the discussion‟ which was included in the

final text. He commented that „At times, it could indeed have appeared, astonishingly enough,

as if Popper and Adorno were in agreement.‟ (Adorno, ed., 1969, 124-5) but he endorsed the

view of Georg Heinrich Weippert that there was in fact an “„extraordinary difference in the

concept of philosophy‟ held by the two symposiasts‟ (Adorno, ed., 1969, 124). Dahrendorf also

reported further comments made by Weippert and others to the effect that „in both papers there

had actually been very little mention of the methodological problems of a sociology which, in its

daily business at least, principally engages in empirical research‟. (Adorno, ed., 1969, 125-6). In

short, although Dahrendorf does not spell this out explicitly, the apparent similarity between the

positions of Popper and Adorno arose from their common adherence still to the „abstract

language of cultivation‟ which Ringer regarded as the hallmark German academic tradition

which was the legacy of the Weimar Republic. The nature of the debate about positivism

strengthened the inclination to resolve methodological problems in philosophical isolation.

Importantly, this was an inclination which was sustained after after Adorno‟s death by his

assistant, Jürgen Habermas, whose On the Logic of the Social Sciences was first published in

German as an article in 1967.

Part II.

Reviving indigenous French traditions.

Jean-Claude Passeron and Pierre Bourdieu, both born in 1930, resisted the dominant

cosmopolitanism and sought to revive an indigenous French intellectual tradition and to retain

allegiance to their French provincial social origins. Passeron was brought up in the Alpes-

Maritimes and educated at a lycée in Nice. Bourdieu was brought up in the Béarn and educated

at a lycée in Pau. Both followed the normal progression for high achieving students in moving

to Paris to take classes préparatoires for entry to the Ecole Normale Supérieure. Both

commenced study at the Ecole in 1950. At the Ecole, Passeron gained his licence in philosophy,

specialising in psycho-physiology, followed, in 1955, by a diplôme d‟études supérieures,

entitled “L‟image spéculaire” under the direction of Daniel Lagache. Passeron was conscripted

to military service in Algeria from 1955 to 1958, returning to France to teach at a lycée in

Marseille until 1961. Bourdieu gained his diplôme d‟études supérieures in 1954 under the

direction of Henri Gouhier with a translation and critical commentary on Leibniz‟s

„Animadversions‟ on a text of Descartes. He began teaching at a lycée in Moulins before he too

was conscripted to military service in Algeria. From 1958 to 1960, Bourdieu was a lecturer at

the University of Algiers. Both were called back to Paris by Raymond Aron – Passeron to

become his assistant at the Sorbonne and Bourdieu to become secretary to the research group

which he had just founded in the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (6th

Section). During the

first half of the 1960s, they collaborated in carrying out empirical researches which explored

some of the theoretical issues articulated by Aron in his lectures at the Sorbonne at the end of

the 1950s, considering in particular the extent to which technological developments in modern

industrial society could still be susceptible to sociological analysis within its traditional

conceptual framework. Hence, Bourdieu and Passeron attempted to analyse the new impact of

photography as a democratically technological new art form, and also to investigate the

consequences for educational practice both of the emergence of new cultural forms and,

relatedly, of a dramatically increasing participation rate of students in higher education. As a

consequence of his post, Passeron was required by Aron to prepare lecture courses on Max

Weber. As secretary to the research group, Bourdieu avoided teaching assistance. The

impression given by Aron‟s posthumously published Mémoires is that Bourdieu kept his head

down for most of the 1960s and suppressed his ideological disagreements with his mentor.

During the 1960s, Bourdieu and Passeron co-authored a number of research reports and articles

as well as the books with which their names are most frequently jointly associated: Les

Héritiers, les étudiants et la culture of 1964 (published in English as The Inheritors, French

Students and their Relation to Culture in 1979) and La reproduction. Eléments pour une théorie

du système d’enseignement (published in English as Reproduction in Education, Society and

Culture in 1977). Although the emphases of their separate texts on education and culture were

slightly different7, they appeared to share a common interest in analysing empirically the

relationship between Sociology and Philosophy by choosing to interrogate, for the research

which was to become Les Héritiers, students of both Sociology and Philosophy at a cluster of

French universities. Although they were both interested philosophically in the epistemology of

the social sciences, it was typical that they should be united in seeking to differentiate

sociologically between the competing epistemological claims of the two discourses. Relatedly,

they were both committed in their empirical work to the attempt to specify the grounds which

might exist for generalising from their particular studies to broader statements about society or

for constructing social theories8.

Passeron and Bourdieu in the 1960s.

In the second half of the 1960s, Bourdieu and Passeron, jointly and separately, seemed to

become more overtly focussed on problems of social scientific methodology or of the

epistemology of the social sciences. Passeron edited in 1967, with Robert Castel, the

publication entitled Education, développement et démocratie (Castel & Passeron, 1967)

discussed in the Introduction to this Preface. In the same year, they co-authored “Sociology and

Philosophy in France since 1945: Death and Resurrection of a Philosophy without Subject”

(Bourdieu & Passeron, 1967b) which was only published in English. Their scrutiny of the

relations between the two discourses was partisan in as much as they offered a social history or

historical sociology of post-war intellectual developments, situating themselves within this

socio-political evolution. By this date, Passeron had moved, in 1966, away from Aron to

become maître de conferences in Sociology at the University of Nantes, where he created a

department of Sociology. He remained in touch with the research of CSE in Paris. Bourdieu

had become a Director of Studies at the newly established Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences

Sociales (EHESS) which involved responsibility for research students and providing training in

research methods. Practical requirements therefore combined with their philosophical

orientations to encourage them to attempt to produce a handbook for research practitioners. In

relation to our understanding of Le raisonnement sociologique, the text which Bourdieu, Jean-

Claude Chamboredon9 and Passeron published in 1968 as Le métier de sociologue (Bourdieu,

Chamboredon, & Passeron, 1968), subsequently published in English in 1991 as The Craft of

Sociology, is very important.

Le métier de sociologue (1968). Divergent positions of Habermas, Passeron and Bourdieu.

The English translation is of the 2nd

edition of the French text, published in 1972. It offers a

translation of the Preface to the 2nd

French edition, dated September, 1972 – a date by which

Bourdieu and Passeron had ceased to collaborate. The Preface makes it clear that the published

volume – sub-titled “Epistemological preliminaries” was „intended to be followed by a second

volume on the construction of the sociological object and a third volume giving a critical review

of the conceptual and technical tools of research” (Bourdieu, Chamboredon, & Passeron, 1991,

x). We must assume that the failure to produce the subsequent volumes relates to the

termination of the professional relationship between Bourdieu and Passeron. The co-authored

explanation for the failure is revealing. The 2nd

edition was an abridged version of the 1st, and

its preparation had given the editors the opportunity to reconsider their original intention. The

argument of the 1st edition had followed the epistemology of science developed by Gaston

Bachelard, especially in his The New Scientific Spirit of 1934 and in his The Philosophy of No:

a Philosophy of the New Scientific Mind of 1940. The book had adopted Bachelard‟s formula

that social facts are „won, constructed, and confirmed‟. It had contained a long introductory

essay – entitled “Epistemology and methodology” – in which the three stages of the procedure

recommended by Bachelard were explicated in turn. There had been a conclusion to this

introduction which was entitled: “Sociology of knowledge and epistemology”. The second

section of the book had assembled „illustrative texts‟ drawn from a range of (mainly)

„sociologists‟. These texts had all been briefly introduced by the editors and had been chosen to

illustrate each of the stages advocated by Bachelard. The underlying assumption appeared to be

that thinkers as ideologically diverse as, for instance, Weber, Durkheim, and Marx, had, in

practice, adopted the same process of inquiry in moving from observation to theorisation.

Another major emphasis of the introduction and the related texts had also been that all science

entails a process whereby explanatory meaning is constructed out of observed raw data and

whereby the scientificity of the explanatory constructions is tested within communities of like-

minded professionals which are themselves socially constructed organisations.

This brief summary of what appears to have been the collectively communicated meaning of Le

métier de sociologue helps us to understand better the barely concealed tensions in the Preface to

the 2nd

edition. The co-editors argued that their intention had been to provide examples in the

second volume of the ways in which the second phase of the Bachelardian process –

constructing the object – could be achieved in practice, and, in the third volume, of the ways in

which the selection of conceptual and technical tools was a process which determined the nature

of possible research findings – that the outcomes of research are functions of the methods

adopted in carrying it out. In going back on these original intentions, the co-editors implied that

there already existed such a supply of standardised handbooks of research methodology that „the

stance of deliberate naïveté could not be sustained‟ (Bourdieu, Chamboredon, & Passeron, 1991,

x). This is a revealing phrase. Bourdieu and Passeron had already acknowledged in their social

historical analysis of the relationship between Philosophy and Sociology in France since 1945

that they belonged to a generation of practising sociologists who had been trained as

philosophers whilst an emergent generation would be initiated into sociology without

philosophical training. Reflecting simply on the period between 1968 and 1972, the editors

realised that they were thinking against the grain such that sociological explanation had become

routinised and professionalised without reference to epistemological reflection. They

commented that they might have been tempted to revise the first volume to try to counteract this

tendency – rewriting it so as to exemplify the validity of the recommended principles by

providing detailed consideration of the choices available in the research processes and of their

consequences „as one can in a seminar, or better in a research group‟ (Bourdieu, Chamboredon,

& Passeron, 1991, x). They were determined not „to resign ourselves to the even-handed

discussion of prevailing theories and concepts which the university tradition has established as

the preliminary to any theoretical discussion‟ but, equally, they were dissuaded from

undertaking a revision of the first volume precisely because they feared that „this effort at

didactic clarification might lead to the very negation of the teaching of research conceived as the

teaching of invention, by encouraging the canonization of the routinized precepts of a new

methodology or, worse still, a new theoretical tradition.‟ (Bourdieu, Chamboredon, & Passeron,

1991, x).

Le métier de sociologue is an important publication because it enables us to clarify what

attitudes the editors held in common but also in what respects they would eventually differ. This

latter clarification is, of course, a little speculative in that it is impossible to know which of the

editors was responsible for which elements of the jointly authored text, but lines of

differentiation can be suggested by reference to their single-authored texts. In relation to the

general outline of the relationship – both intellectual and institutionally consolidated – between

Philosophy and Social Science presented in Part I of this introduction, Bourdieu and Passeron

were clearly at one in denying to academic philosophy the right to legislate over social scientific

practice. They chose to work in the footsteps of the philosophizing scientific practitioners rather

than of the philosophers of science. The introduction to Le métier de sociologue makes no

explicit reference to the positivist dispute taking place contemporaneously within German

sociological circles. Whether or not Bourdieu and Passeron consciously rejected the orientation

of Habermas as developed in On the Logic of the Social Sciences, published first in 1967, they

were certainly conscious at the time that they were fighting simultaneously on two fronts –

against a-philosophical neo-positivism as manifest in American social science and against

idealist, non-practical philosophizing as manifest in the German tradition. Like Habermas,

Bourdieu and Passeron accepted that the current debate about social science seemed to involve a

conflict between two traditions emanating from the late 19th

Century – between what Habermas

defined as „the nomological sciences, whose aim it is to formulate and verify hypotheses

concerning the laws governing empirical regularities‟ and „the historical-hermeneutic sciences,

which appropriate and analyze meaningful cultural entities handed down by tradition‟

(Habermas, 1990, 1). They also appear to have been united in rejecting the approach adopted by

Habermas in seeking to reconcile these competing traditions. Having characterised „the Dualism

of the Natural and Cultural Sciences‟, Habermas regretted that

“This continuing dualism, which we take for granted in the practice of science, is no

longer discussed in terms of the logic of science. Instead of being addressed at the level

of the philosophy of science, it simply finds expression in the coexistence of two distinct

frames of reference” (Habermas, 1990, 1-2).

It was Habermas‟s intention to remedy this deficiency. After their characterisation of the same

dualism in a section of the introduction to Le métier de sociologue entitled „Epistemology of the

social sciences and epistemology of the natural sciences‟, Bourdieu and Passeron asserted:

“The way to move beyond these academic debates, and beyond the academic way of

moving beyond them, is to subject scientific practice to a reflection which, unlike the

classical philosophy of knowledge, is applied not to science that has been done – true

science, for which one has to establish the conditions of possibility and coherence or the

claims to legitimacy – but to science in progress.” (Bourdieu, Chamboredon, & Passeron,

1991, 8).

Although epistemological scrutiny of social scientific research should not be undertaken ex post

facto in philosophical space, Bourdieu and Passeron were equally agreed that research practice

should not be thought to be an a-philosophical activity. Social science had to be constructed

against everyday prenotions – against „spontaneous‟ sociology or anthropology. The emphasis

of „construction‟ was a unifying theme in their explanation of the failure to complete the project.

However, the consensual text of Le métier de sociologue concealed different approaches to the

way in which non-idealist philosophizing should be an integral part of social scientific research.

In the year of the publication of Le métier de sociologue (1968), Bourdieu published

“Structuralism and Theory of Sociological Knowledge” (translated from French but never

published in French). His intention was to introduce „a clear-cut distinction between theory of

sociological knowledge and theory of the social system‟. He attempted this distinction in the

following sentence:

“The theory of sociological knowledge, as the system of principles and rules governing

the production of all sociological propositions scientifically grounded, and of them alone,

is the generating principle of all partial theories of the social and, therefore, the unifying

principle of a properly sociological discourse which must not be confused with a unitary

theory of the social.” (Bourdieu, 1968, 681).

In the light of Bourdieu‟s subsequent „post-structuralism‟, it is surprising to find that he

celebrated the achievement of structuralism because it had endeavoured to introduce into social

scientific research principles which were well established in mathematics and physics. Notably,

it had „greatly contributed to wiping out the fictitious originality assigned to anthropological

knowledge by the spontaneous theory of such a knowledge.‟ (Bourdieu, 1968, 681). What

constituted social science, for Bourdieu, was the adoption of a common meta-scientific

methodology which secured scientificity irrespective of the ideologies or social theories which

were extrapolated from research findings. There were two corollaries of this position, as he

elaborated:

“It follows, on the one hand, that the plurality of theories of the social system must not

conceal the unity of the meta-science upon which all that in the former stands out as

scientific is founded: scholars such as Marx, Durkheim and Weber, totally different in

their views of social philosophy and ultimate values, were able to agree on the main

points of the fundamental principles of the theory of knowledge of the social world. It

follows, on the other hand, that what is usually called the „unity of science‟ is nothing

but the unity of meta-science, the identity of principles upon which all science, including

the science of man, is founded.” (Bourdieu, 1968, 682).

It was this belief in an underlying principle of all science, formally, but not substantively,

identical with Comte‟s belief in the comprehensive validity of „positivist‟ method, which

underpinned Bourdieu‟s conception of the organization of the presentation in Le métier de

sociologue. The text adopted Bachelard‟s formula as the meta-scientific principle of all science.

But Bourdieu went further. Not only does all science have to be constructed against

commonsense experience, the interpretations of differentiated sciences only come into existence

and have the possibility of confirmation or falsification within epistemic communities which are

socially constructed. The conclusion to the introduction of Le métier de sociologue –

“Sociology of knowledge and epistemology” – tried to analyse sociologically the ways in which

particular sciences become distinguished from the scientifically unifying meta-science,

culminating in the recommendation that there was now an urgent need for sociology socially to

constitute itself.

The position outlined above was an extension of the position adopted by Bourdieu in relation to

photography, with which Passeron had already disagreed earlier in the 1960s. Passeron had

tried to analyse sociologically the development of a discourse about photographs – how far that

discourse borrowed from the language of art appreciation and how far it differed on the tacit

assumption that pure „aesthetic‟ judgements of photographs are contaminated by ethical

judgements because photographs inescapably capture „reality‟. Bourdieu had been interested in

the same questions, but his response was to analyse the mechanisms by which or the contexts

within which differing criteria of judgement became established. He analysed the social

function of photography in peasant society and the aestheticization and professionalization of

photography effected by photographic clubs, seeing the transition from one to the other as a

case-study in the general transition from traditional to modern social organization. There is no

evidence that Passeron was interested in identifying and imposing any unifying meta-science

and, equally, there is no evidence that Passeron considered the sociology of knowledge to

involve an analysis of the behaviour of epistemic communities. It is useful, I think, to suggest

that, as constructivists, Passeron was interested in the „logical‟ construction of the world (as

outlined by Carnap) whilst Bourdieu was interested in its „social‟ construction (as outlined by

Schutz). Their common constructivism and their common antipathy to Germanic intellectual

detachment concealed this fundamental difference.

I suggest that Passeron came to think that Bourdieu was on course to renegue on the position he

had advanced in “Structuralism and Theory of Sociological Knowledge”. Whereas that article

had distinguished between the theory of sociological knowledge and the theory of the social

system, it was Passeron‟s view that Bourdieu was beginning to articulate a view of agency

which bridged the gap between the two types of theory by emphasizing that sociologists are

knowledge-constructing agents within the social system which they conceptualise as one of

competing agents. Bourdieu had proceeded to argue in his article that anthropology (and,

tacitly, also sociology) could only make progress by rejecting „the clear-cut opposition

established by Leibniz and all classical rationalism between truths of reason and truths of fact,

between formal eternal truths of logic and mathematics and contingent empirical truths of

history‟ (Bourdieu, 1968, 683). It was beginning to seem as if Bourdieu was taking the view

that the dialectic, rather than the opposition, which he was positing here should primarily be

actualised or effected within the sphere of fact or experience rather than of reason or logic. It

should be effected by the habitus. The two men co-authored La reproduction. Eléments pour

une théorie du système d’enseignement in 1970. As is well known, the book was offered in two

parts, the first of which consisted in a sequence of „propositions‟ whilst the second attempted to

apply these propositions to a particular historical case – that of the contemporary French

educational system. The book tried to represent the logic of the process which had led to its

particular view of the system of education. It was not trying to offer a static and definitive

theory of the educational system but to provide access to an instrumental conceptual process and

an articulation of concepts which could be put to play dialectically in other situations. The

offering of an account of the process of reaching provisional explanations on the basis of

contingent facts appears to have supplanted the imposition of the Bachelardian methodological

formula, but Le métier de sociologue and La reproduction were consistent in maintaining that

the defining characteristic of sociological explanation had to derive from the exploratory process

adopted rather than from any transient reification of social reality. The Foreword to La

reproduction clearly summarised the way in which the logical process captured in the text was a

representation of the methodology of the research, rather than a commentary on it:

“Unlike a mere catalogue of actual relations or a summa of theoretical statements, the

body of propositions presented in Book I is the outcome of an effort to organize into a

system amenable to logical verification on the one hand propositions which were

constructed in and for the operations of our research or were seen to be logically required

as a ground for its findings, and on the other hand theoretical propositions which enabled

us to construct, by deduction or specification, propositions amenable to direct empirical

verification.” (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1970, 9; 1977, ix)

However, this passage had a footnote which commented in the following way:

“The theory of pedagogic action presented here is grounded in a theory of the relations

between objective structures, the habitus and practice, which will be set out more fully in

a forthcoming book by Pierre Bourdieu.” (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1970, 9; 1977, xiii).

Whereas the passage from the main text outlines the practical process of conceptualisation - of

creating sociological knowledge - in the research enquiry, the passage in the footnote points

towards a position which subverts the former. It suggests that an achieved theory of action is

presented which is „grounded‟ in a theory which is not logical but immanently existential, of the

relations between objective (actual?) structures, the habitus (conceptual or biological?), and

practice. The footnote points towards Bourdieu‟s Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique (1972),

subsequently published in translation in modified form as Outline of a Theory of Practice

(1977), in which he was to illustrate both that social agents unreflectingly construct the actual

structures which constrain their actions and that sociologists construct conceptual structures

which, if analysed in a reflexively sociological manner, expose those primary, meaningful

actions which otherwise would have remained unarticulated. Meanwhile, Bourdieu had already

given a paper at a British Sociological Association conference in Durham, UK, in April, 1970,

entitled “Reproduction culturelle et reproduction sociale” [Cultural and Social Reproduction)

which seemed to emphasize that the jointly authored text was offering a theory of the social

system, an emphasis consolidated by the subsequent English translation which adopted the title

of Bourdieu‟s paper rather than the sub-title of the French book (Reproduction in Education,

Society and Culture).

Passeron and Bourdieu: the end of their collaboration (1972).

Bourdieu‟s work seemed to be moving towards the substantialism which he had rejected in

“Structuralism and Theory of Sociological Knowledge”. The „relationalism‟ which he had

advocated appeared to be in the process of being absorbed within a substantialist view. The

revision of substantialism in the light of theories of relativity seemed not to be modifying the

form of substantialist thought. Bourdieu seemed to be resolving the tension between realism and

nominalism by inserting nominalist conceptualisation within a framework of realist behaviour.

By contrast, Passeron retained his primary concern with the logic of scientific discovery – a

concern which was differentiated from that of Popper in the book of that title in as much as

Passeron remained interested in the exercise of logic in research practice and in the operation of

that logic through the languages adopted in plural sciences rather than uniformly in „science‟ as

such. Having established the Department of Sociology at the University of Nantes, Passeron

was invited to found the Department of Sociology in 1968 in the Centre Universitaire

Expérimentale at Vincennes – the main pedagogical innovation in higher education introduced

by the government in response to the May „events‟ of student and trade union unrest. The terms

of reference set for the new institution included the insistence that it should be

„pluridisciplinary‟. Work in association, or in competition, with colleagues in the Department of

Philosophy at Vincennes such as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-François Lyotard,

must have confirmed Passeron‟s philosophical interest in the boundaries between disciplines in

the context of their practical application to social problems.

Passeron‟s post must have been preoccupying and stressful. We know from Didier Eribon‟s

biography that Foucault‟s participation in the oppression and exclusion experienced by students

in the innovatory institution provided insights which fed into his thinking about power and

governmentality. Other than an introduction to a translation which he co-produced of Richard

Hoggart‟s The Uses of Literacy, published in 1970 as La culture du pauvre, and the presentation

of a translation which, again, he co-produced, of Joseph Schumpeter‟s Zur Soziologie der

Imperialismen, published in 1972 as Impérialisme et classes sociales, Passeron published only a

few articles which mainly considered the nature of the structural obstacles to pedagogical

innovation. Both translations, however, were indicative of his continuing interest in the

languages of social scientific explanation. The first enabled Passeron to reflect on the

relationship between linguistic and socio-cultural changes, appropriating Hoggart as a covert or

latent linguistic ethnologist rather than, as in England, a literary critic turned analyst of popular

culture. The second enabled Passeron to consider in respect of the work of Schumpeter the

question which was also of concern in relation to the legacy of Weberian methodology of social

science – that of the discipline boundaries between competing social sciences – Economics and

Sociology. In 1977, Passeron left Vincennes, seconded to the Centre National de la Recherche

Scientifique (CNRS) where he founded the groupe inter-universitaire de documentation et

d‟enquêtes sociologiques (G.I.D.E.S). In this context, he was involved in research projects on

the introduction of audio-visual documentation into libraries and also on reading, but the most

important production of this period was a thesis presented at the University of Nantes and

published there internally in 1980 entitled: Les mots de la sociologie [the words of sociology].

Passeron‟s diplôme d’études supérieures on „the mirror image‟ had reviewed the phenomenon

by examining three different psychological traditions of thought in respect of the identity of the

self. It had been directed by Daniel Lagache who was to direct a project leading to the

publication, in 1960, of a Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse, edited by Laplanche and Pontalis.

This was a project which endeavoured to do for the study of the language of psychoanalysis

what Lalande had attempted in respect of the language of philosophy in his Vocabulaire

technique et critique de la philosophie. Lalande‟s book was in its 8th

edition in 1960, having

first been published serially between 1902 and 1923 in the Bulletin de la société française de

Philosophie. Lalande‟s intention had been to establish a universal vocabulary of philosophical

discourse. As such, this intention had been directly contrary to the orientation of Bourdieu,

Chamboredon, and Passeron, displayed inadequately (by their own admission) in Le métier de

sociologue. Passeron regarded the production of Les mots de la sociologie as his opportunity to

write a sequel to Le métier de sociologue as he exclusively would have wished to write it and at

the same time to consider whether sociological terminology could be standardised in the way

intended by Lalande for philosophy and Lagache and his followers for psychoanalysis.

Passeron: Les mots de la sociologie (1980).

The book deliberately arose out of Passeron‟s practice as the director of seminars organised for

research students. It provides bibliographic details of 51 texts with specific extracts which were

obviously used in discussion with students and are then cited in the text. Subtitled “Sociologie

et analogie”[sociology and analogy], it was presented in four sections: “Un Lexique

impossible” [an impossible dictionary]; “Les Recours illusoires” [illusory recourse strategies];

“Language, Instruments et Concepts” [language, instruments and concepts]; “La Preuve et

l‟analogie‟ [proof and analogy]. The main contention of the work was most clearly articulated

in a sub-section of the third section, entitled “Les „Lalande‟ sociologiques et „l‟ordre des

raisons‟” [sociological „Lalandes‟ and „the order of reasons‟] where Passeron commented:

We can put our finger on what separates the craft of sociology from the simple

possession of an intellectual culture, i.e. of a purely theoretical mastery of the history of

sociological theories, when we realise that a „sociological Lalande‟ conceived in this way

would expose its almost complete lack of use for establishing the mastery of the

sociological field necessitated by research. The systemic meaning of sociological

concepts in effect relates at least as much to their role in the systematic treatment of data

as to their place in a theoretical system.” (Passeron, 1980, 164-5)

In other words, a sociological dictionary cannot be contemplated (Section I of the book) because

sociological discourse is categorally different from philosophical in that the sociological use of

concepts is always contingent and always the product of a dialectical relationship between the

language used by scientific analysts and the everyday language of those whom they observe. To

put this differently, sociological language is always situated within the socio-historical

conditions which produce it. There can be no recourse (Section II of the book) to sociological

language as logical abstraction.

Passeron in the 1980s.

The clarification of thinking achieved in Les mots de la sociologie enabled a new dynamism in

Passeron‟s career as a researcher and teacher. In 1982, he became a Director of Studies at the

Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (E.H.E.S.S) and a year later he was responsible

for implementing the decentralisation policies of CNRS and EHESS by establishing a site at the

Vieille-Charité in Marseille. For the rest of the 1980s, he directed several research groups there,

notably CERCOM (Centre de Recherches sur Culture et Communication) from 1984 to 1992,

and IMEREC (Institut Méditerranéen de Recherche et de Création) from 1985 to 1991. During

this period, he wrote several articles arising from research projects which were embedded in the

multi-ethnic and multicultural context of Marseille. In particular, a workshop which Passeron

led with Claude Grignon (who had become hostile to Bourdieu‟s work after the publication of

Bourdieu‟s La distinction in 1979) in 1982, went through several local editions until it was

finally published by Seuil/Gallimard in 1989 as Le savant et le populaire: misérabilisme et

populisme en sociologie et en littérature. Throughout this decade, in short, Passeron‟s

epistemological practice was evident, but Les mots de la sociologie – the rationale for this

practice - remained unpublished. The publication of the first edition of Le raisonnement

sociologique in 1991 to a large degree remedied this omission. (see Part III for detailed

discussion).

Passeron in the 1990s and to the present.

Shortly after the publication of Le raisonnement sociologique, Passeron established a new pluri-

disciplinary research centre at Marseille – Sociologie, Histoire, Anthropologie des Dynamiques

Culturelles (SHADYC) [Sociology, History, Anthropology of Cultural Dynamics]. The centre

founded a Review – Enquête: sociologie, histoire, anthropologie – which, from 1999, was

issued as a series of volumes by the Editions EHESS. The research centre and the journal were

mutually reinforcing. The element common to the practice and the theory remained an

expression of Passeron‟s commitment to the analysis of the languages (of description and

explanation) of disciplines in the context of enquiry about aspects of objective cultural change.

Passeron ceased to be Director of SHADYC in 1996, but he continued to be closely associated

with its work, certainly up to the point when, in 2010, it became absorbed into a new Centre

Norbert Elias, amalgamating research groups in Marseille, Aix-en-Provence, and Lyon, under

the direction of Jean Boutier.

As Passeron discusses in his new preface, a complete issue of the Revue européenne des

sciences sociales was devoted to discussion of his work in 1996. This number contains a

bibliography of his work to that date, but I want to take this opportunity to point readers to more

publications of interest in the decade beyond, highlighting several themes. I think it is fair to say

that, understandably, Passeron has continued, mostly in theoretical reflection, to clarify his

position on the relationship between theory and research practice. There has been a marked

renewal of interest in Weber‟s methodology as well as in Weber and Pareto on rationality.

There has been evidence of continuing interest in the work of the semiologist Luis Prieto as well

as of Richard Hoggart. There has been continuing interest in education and popular culture, and

several sensitive and insightful analyses of the work of Bourdieu following the death of his

former collaborator in 2002. Finally, he has completed an account of his intellectual

development, entitled Un itinéraire de sociologue, published by Albin Michel. References to a

selection of these articles are given below in the references at the end of this Preface.

Part III.

Passeron: Le raisonnement sociologique (1991).

At the beginning of the final chapter of Sociological Reasoning, Passeron states:

“In concluding I have therefore attempted to sum up the epistemological assertions

articulated through the preceding texts in a series of ranked propositions, since most of

these texts were influenced by the context in which they were originally published. My

aim is simply to lay bare, through the crudeness of these statements, the logical form of

all sociological reasoning, in order to clarify the relationship between empirical proof

and the descriptive or explicative assertions that in the social sciences – sciences that are

necessarily historical unless they are to become „sciences of fantasy‟ by forgetting their

real object – can only be based on the observation of „individual configurations‟.

(Passeron, 2012, this translation, 302).

In summarising the book and highlighting points of comparison with the work of Bourdieu, I

now pay attention to the details of the original publication of the chapters of Le raisonnement

sociologique so as to situate them socio-historically, even though Passeron organised their

presentation thematically rather than chronologically. In doing this, I inevitably raise for

consideration the question whether Passeron‟s book shows a chronological progression from an

original interest in the instrumental function in empirical investigation of immanent theoretical

propositions towards an increasingly dominant interest in philosophical propositions about

research practice as abstractly prescriptive of that practice. Just as La reproduction sought to

present „propositions‟, so Le raisonnement sociologique comparably offers a final chapter of

„propositions‟ and associated glosses. This final chapter adopts a philosophical stance to

explicate the unique nature of reasoning in the social sciences which is neither „experimental‟

nor „hermeneutic‟. Whereas the propositions of La reproduction were presented as intrinsic to

the process of research recounted, the propositions of Le raisonnement sociologique attempt to

give an abstract account of a process which is fundamentally not abstract. This account is not

part of the process which it seeks to explain. Passeron‟s concluding propositions present a

summation of those reflections on his practice articulated during the research processes which he

directed or with which he was involved. These reflections do not offer a blueprint for reflexivity

in the bourdieusian sense. Consistent with the position which he advances, Passeron offers

guidance for the deployment of reason in undertaking epistemological evaluation of sociological

work. He does not allow this reasoning to become immersed in the experiences which it seeks to

explain.

The 2006 text.

The Preface was written for the revised edition of 2006. Here Passeron comments that the 1991

publication of Sociological Reasoning „marked a breathing space on an epistemological journey

begun in 1968‟ (with the publication with Bourdieu and Chamboredon of Le métier de

sociologue) and he makes general reference to texts produced since 1991 which have prolonged

his engagement with epistemological issues, indicating that he had finally decided not to

incorporate these post-1991 texts into the 2006 edition of the original text. Here he also details

the circumstances which mean that the Preface which follows is a revised version (written in

2005) of the Foreword which he had retrieved from memory for the 1991 edition. He comments

that “I do not know whether this new opening text will be easier to read or more persuasive than

the old one” which suggests that he sees it as significantly different and more than a retrieval of

its original. The sub-title – „defence of the historical sciences as sciences‟ – and the opening

sentences both indicate Passeron‟s theme. The question to be considered is whether sociological

explanation is scientific at all and, if so, in what way. Passeron‟s answer is to argue that the

phenomena to be explained sociologically are in constant flux and that, equally, the

terminologies adopted to register these fluctuations are themselves contained within the flux.

Hence, sociology can never be an „experimental‟ science because of the non-repeatability of its

objects but neither can it occupy a detached social space within which to undertake hermeneutic

interpretations of texts independent of the social conditions of production of those texts. Social

phenomena are inevitably historical as are the discourses adopted to explain them. Passeron‟s

contention is that many of his contemporaries were attempting to cloak themselves in

scientificity by claiming to adopt in social science the procedures for the refutation of

hypotheses articulated by Karl Popper in the Logic of Scientific Discovery but, although

criticism of Popper‟s work is central to Sociological Reasoning, he is also clearly distancing

himself from the position which Bourdieu sought to impose in The Craft of Sociology. Written

in tandem with The Craft of Sociology, Bourdieu argued independently in “Structuralism and

Theory of Sociological Knowledge” (Bourdieu, 1968) that the validity of sociological

explanation is dependent on its adoption of an unifying methodological procedure which

transcends ideological differences and differing social situations. The Craft of Sociology offered

Bachelard‟s formula that „the scientific fact is won, constructed, and confirmed‟ (Bourdieu,

Chamboredon, & Passeron, (1968), 1991, 11) as just such an unifying procedure. Even though it

is my belief that Bourdieu proceeded, in the 1970s and beyond, to transform what in Bachelard

had been advanced as a procedure within science into a procedure, analoguous with

phenomenological reduction and derived from Husserl‟s The Crisis of European Sciences,

which should problematise that science10

, nevertheless Bourdieu‟s orientation remained

dogmatically and a-historically prescriptive in a way which was unacceptable to Passeron.

Passeron comments: “No one form of “epistemic rationality” has a monopoly on the scientific

mind” and he at once proceeds to exonerate Bachelard who used the term „scientific mind‟ to

offer „an open field for the epistemologist‟s descriptions, more conducive to comparisons

between disciplines because it tends less to be circumscribed by a given sector of research or

modelled on a privileged illustration case‟. For Passeron, Bachelard‟s „historical epistemology‟,

or historical analysis of the conditions of epistemological change, was designed to invite

methodological plurality rather than a controlling uniformity reminiscent of Comte‟s programme

for positivist science. Passeron‟s commitment is to sociological practice which involves the

exercise of rationality in ways which change in relation to changing circumstances and his

orientation is to liberate researchers from prescriptive conceptual frameworks without forfeiting

rigorous rationality. He spells out this commitment at the end of this passage in the Preface:

“It is for the researcher, comparing different forms of scientific knowledge through the

weave of their reasoning, to identify the models and operations that can be transposed to

his own work of discovery and proof.”

It is no surprise, therefore, that three of the key chapters of Sociological Reasoning (chapters 2,

6, and 10) are excerpts from the thesis Passeron submitted at the University of Nantes in 1980,

which was based on the courses he had offered for research students, nor that most of the articles

of the book are „occasional‟ – reflections on issues raised in the course of various research

projects. On the contrary, the surprise is that he should attempt a methodological summation in

the propositions, scholia, and definitions of the final chapter. Although substantively different,

the question is whether the prescriptive libertarianism of the summation is, formally, different in

kind from that advanced by Bourdieu.

Part I of Sociological Reasoning comprises four chapters which seek to elaborate the contention

that sociological reasoning is „an in-between reasoning‟, that is to say, neither operating in terms

of formal logic nor reducible to everyday narrative exchange. Chapter 2 contains an extract from

the 1980 thesis. Chapter 3 amalgamates texts first published in 1986 and 1990. Chapter 4 was

first published in 1986, and Chapter 5 in 1982.

Chapter 2 picks up its original version on page 5 with the paragraph beginning: “Something of

the logical status of the words of sociological language ...”. The introductory pages correlate

with Chapter 1 in giving a 1991 account of issues in terms of the historical (and geographical)

conditions of existence of demarcations between different social science disciplines. The chapter

interestingly frames the text of 1980 in the more refined terms of 1991. The introductory pages

make it clear that Passeron now rejects the „quasi-experimentation‟ that he had found appealing

in the mid-1960s (see the introductory remarks above) in favour of a thorough acceptance of the

historical dimension of all social science. The rest of the chapter argues that a lexicon of

sociological terminology is not possible because sociological concepts do not have the same

status as philosophical ones. The argument anticipates the later historical emphasis in as much

as Passeron insists that sociological reasoning demands a dynamically interactive logic rather

than a statically referential one.

It seems likely that Chapter 3 divides between its 1986 and its 1990 source at the section entitled

“Sociology and Social History of the difference between the disciplines”. The first half of the

chapter prolongs earlier discussion of the nature of comparative method by considering the

relationship between particular (historical) „facts‟ and general (sociological) explanation of

them. Passeron argues that language can fabricate an apparent comparability of phenomena

which is challenged by close attention to specifics. Concepts deployed loosely across diverse

contexts can generate false commonality in the same way as the bureaucratic application of

„decisional comparability‟ generates false criteria of evaluation. (See the introduction above).

We have to guard against „the vagaries of untamed comparatism‟ (p.7). The context of the

source of the second half of the chapter in a debate between Passeron and the historian of

education Alain Prost at first sight seems to have trapped Passeron into a discussion of the social

conditions of the differentiation between the practices of the different professionals. He quickly

contends, however, that the socially constructed differentiation between the disciplines is

superficial and that the more important distinction is between history and sociology together in

opposition to experimental sciences. He proceeds to emphasize that history and sociology are

on the same side in this more general epistemological division: “Thus in order to escape the

experimentalist illusion that would remove its object, sociological reasoning needs to feel itself

constantly “recalled” to the order of historical contextualization.” (p. 22).

Chapter 4 was first given at a symposium on “Social Reproduction and Sociological theory” at

the Xth World Congress of Sociology in 1982, and subsequently published in 1986. This is an

important article in which Passeron explicitly reflects on the status of the conceptual apparatus

which he had constructed with Bourdieu in 1970 in La reproduction. Arguing in general terms

and never naming Bourdieu, he dissociates himself from the interpretation of the earlier text

given by Bourdieu in “Cultural reproduction and Social reproduction” (Bourdieu, 1971, [1973]),

implying that Bourdieu had used their jointly developed concepts to reify a theory of social

change instead of advancing them as temporary devices for making sense of constantly changing

circumstances. As Passeron puts it succinctly: “... social reproduction should not be confused

with a process of historical repetition. Research should beware of being misled by the biological

metaphor contained in the biological concept.” (p.13).

The paper which is presented as Chapter 5 was originally (1982) sub-titled: „remarks on the

language of variables and interpretation in the social sciences‟. Passeron draws considerably on

a research project on libraries undertaken with M. Grumbach and published in 1981 as L’Oeil à

la page [the eye on the page] (Passeron & Grumbach, 2nd

edn., 1985). The focus is on the status

of statistical categories as comparative abstractions and Passeron reiterates his insistence that

categories of understanding deployed in investigations, especially longitudinal investigations,

have to be inserted within the historical process which they help to disclose. Statistical

categorisation can lead to the same „untamed comparatism‟ as logical assimilation. Referring to

the project on libraries, Passeron illustrates his point in the following way:

“The relations observed in a study of libraries between ethnicity, age, class or gender on

the one hand, and practices or attitudes on the other, should not lead us to conclude that

they can be generalized to groups with the “same” name outside the institution. It is not

“women” – nor “housewives”, “young people”, “pensioners”, “immigrants” or different

social classes – whose collective attitudes are revealed in terms of probability, but only

the samples created within each of these categories through registration with or use of a

library – samples that are differently selective and differently biased by institutional

sampling” (p. 11)

Part II of Sociological Reasoning shifts attention away from analysis towards the writing of

sociological findings. Chapter 6 reproduces the second section of Les Mots de la sociologie

(1980). Chapter 7 is derived from two sources, the first part derived from an earlier version

published in 1987, and the second part taken from the Foreword to the publication of 1981

reporting on the project on libraries already mentioned. Chapter 8 reproduces an article

published in the Revue française de sociologie in 1990, whilst Chapter 9 was first published in

1987 and refined for inclusion in the 1990 edition of Le savant et le populaire [the scientist and

the ordinary man] – a text based on a seminar held in Marseille in 1980 which Passeron

published in collaboration with Claude Grignon.

In Chapter 6, Passeron reasserts his view that “What makes the historical sciences into sciences

in the full sense of the term is neither formalism nor experimental method, but methodological

control of comparative reasoning” (p. 9) and explores ways which have been attempted to

exercise that methodological control linguistically. He attacks the terminological proscriptions

deployed by Marxists. He suggests that we have to use „natural language‟ rather than artificial

language. Passeron was aware that we necessarily construct an artificial language to say things

scientifically about phenomena articulated in natural language by social agents, but we have to

be vigilant to ensure that the artifices are not taken for realities. In a section entitled „the

artificial paradises of formalism‟ he emphasizes „natural language‟ in this text of 1980 in a way

in which he no longer did when he dropped the term from the sub-title of Sociological

Reasoning, but the points which he makes relate now to the increasing use of computer

generated findings from qualitative narrative transcripts: “The illusion of enunciatory

onmnipotence fostered by an artificial language requires heightened semantic vigilance in an

empirical science of observation precisely because the technology of calculation appears to take

full charge of the imperatives of methodological vigilance.” (p. 17). In continuing to attack

attempts to systematise conceptual control, Passeron criticises, en passant, the publications of

Georges Gurvitch which exerted powerful influence over methodological training in France at

the time. However, it seems likely that this critique is also an undercover attack on the way in

which Passeron believed that Bourdieu was developing a meta-sociological reflexivity: “Given

the form of the relations between empirical and theoretical that creates sociological

intelligibility, there can be no such thing as a meta-sociology. The analysis of the production of

sociological knowledge is an epistemology, not a knowledge of the social world”. (p. 22).

The break in Chapter 7 occurs half way through the text at p.6. Passeron‟s discussion in the first

part clearly reflects his desire to put a brake on a discourse about „novelty‟ which seemed to be

prevalent in a conference on sport and society. This was a particular example of the way in

which language was being used with insufficient scientific scrutiny. Passeron explores two sub-

themes. There is a need, firstly, for vigilance to ensure that scientific analysis of social

phenomena is not supplanted by journalistic assessments. However, Passeron is not simply

drawing attention to a tension between scientific and ordinary language descriptions.

Intellectual discourse is often as culpable as popular because it is tempted to ignore scientific

rigour in the quest to identify and unify intrinsically disparate phenomena. Here Hegel is found

guilty as much as media commentators. Passeron‟s reflections on the deployment of language

bears comparison with the way in which, contemporaneously, Bourdieu was seeking to analyse

the effects of Heidegger‟s appropriation of ordinary language within his ontological philosophy

– (Bourdieu, 1988, [1991], based on Bourdieu, 1975). The chapter is integrated by the common

concern with the extent to which language constructs „new‟ social phenomena to be analysed

sociologically. Passeron considers the term „audio-visual‟ as a construction which supplies an

apparently insatiable need for „novelty‟ in the same way as does terminology about sport.

Passeron‟s reflections on the „audio-visual‟ arose out of a research project which sought to

analyse the effects on library use of the introduction of audio-visual technologies. Typically,

Passeron‟s interest is in the nature and impact of the new tool affecting popular literacy whereas,

Bourdieu‟s comparable project of the 1960s on the use of art galleries and museums (Bourdieu,

Darbel, & Schnapper, 1966, [1990]) focused on the social position-taking of populations of

visitors to cultural institutions. Does an „audio-visual‟ phenomenon constitute something

significantly different from the phenomena which make up its component parts? Passeron

argues persuasively that different media of communication are terminologically juxtaposed in a

way which embeds meaning in common parlance and that this juxtaposition corresponds with a

social need for ongoing technological innovation, but he, nevertheless, pleads that we should

„avoid confusing this common sense knowledge with a philosophy of the eye and the ear‟(p.11).

In microcosm, this reveals Passeron‟s general orientation in Sociological Reasoning:

sociologists must accept that in their enquiries and in their findings they necessarily participate

conceptually in the processes which they observe, but this participation should not rule out the

capacity to philosophize about the validity of used and observed distinctions. As conclusion to

his consideration of the „audio-visual‟, Passeron considers the implications of adopting different

media in communicating research findings. He invites evaluation of the effects of diagrammatic

or graphic representations with verbal ones. In respect to the communication of research

findings, Passeron here explores issues that he had examined in chapter 5 in relation to the use

of statistics in defining research problems.

Chapter 8 dates from 1990 and warrants comparison with Bourdieu‟s “L‟illusion biographique”

(Bourdieu, 1986) which Passeron cites on p.4. Passeron‟s discussion relates to the „narrative

turn‟ in social science and he illuminatingly examines the validity of the analogy between social

position-taking and the negotiation of transport systems. Passeron is critical of the

anonymisation of individuals attempted in structural analysis (perhaps suggesting in passing a

dislike of Bourdieu‟s methodology in Homo Academicus (Bourdieu, 1984, [1988]) and, equally,

critical of the over-estimation of the capacities of individuals to constitute their own contexts.

Passeron argues that it is a fallacy to suppose that individuals exclusively construct the

objectivities by which they are constrained. As he puts it: “Groups or classes that can be

identified on the basis of lasting effects ... possess properties and a history that cannot be

reduced to those of the individuals or lineages that circulate between the groups, within their

generation or from one generation to another” (p.5). Passeron is sceptical about extreme forms

of social constructivism and is concerned that „biographical method‟ in social research might

neglect the proper function of sociology and social history to understand contexts which

reproduce themselves autonomously. Passeron cogently questions the validity of the concept of

„habitus‟ as a solution to the individualist/objectivist tension in sociological explanation,

mentioning the work of the „Bourdieu school‟ and positioning its emphasis in relation to

Bourdieu‟s references to Leibniz and to Sartre‟s biography of Flaubert.

Chapter 9 pursues the same line of enquiry as outlined in chapter 8 but shifts the emphasis more

specifically to consider the nature and status of „literature‟ and to examine the distinction

(blurred in „narrative‟ research) between literary and sociological analyses. Passeron maintains

the focus of this second Part of the book by concentrating on the nature of writing: how do

„realist‟ novelists convince their readers that their fictions are „based on fact‟ and, equally, how

do sociologists or historians convince their readers that their accounts of social reality are not

fictions? Passeron examines the relationship between „sociology‟ (science) and „sociography‟

(description) and broadens discussion to consider a range of comparable suffixes. In his 1985

interview with Axel Honneth and others, published as „Fieldwork in philosophy‟ in Choses dites

(Bourdieu, 1987, [1990]), Bourdieu recalled that it was in the mid-1960s that the full force of the

„-ology‟ effect‟ was felt. He specified the adoption of „archaeology‟, „grammatology‟, and

„semiology‟ as labels for intellectual initiatives. Without naming names, Bourdieu was, of

course, retrospectively criticising Foucault, Derrida, and Barthes. He argued that this

development „was a clear expression of the effort philosophers were making to break down the

frontier between science and philosophy‟ (Bourdieu, 1987, [1990, 6]). Bourdieu‟s implication is

that the new terminologies were strategic devices adopted by philosophers to make their work

acceptable. By contrast, Passeron is interested in the intrinsic differences between –graphies and

–logies. He also considers the force of –nomy, as in astronomy, which enables him to reassert

his general contention that sociology should never be thought to be nomological.

Part III assembles texts on „Enquiry and Interpretation‟. It begins (Chapter 10) with a third

extract from the 1980 thesis on Les mots de la sociologie, thus confirming that the structure of

argumentation in Sociological Reasoning follows that developed in practice with research

students in Nantes. Chapter 11 was first published in 1981 as the Preface to the published

version of a thesis which Passeron had supervised at Paris VIII in the late 1970s. Chapter 12

was based on two versions of 1991, one of which had been the introduction to a research report

of a project on painting undertaken by Passeron and Emmanuel Pedler. No reference is given

for Chapter 13 which indicates, I assume, that it is published for the first time in Sociological

Reasoning and belongs, therefore, to 1991

Chapter 10 reproduces the first half of the final part of Les mots de la sociologie which there

was sub-titled: „Analogy and Proof‟. The fact that Passeron comments in a note at the end of

the chapter that the remainder of the original text is covered in the Propositions of the

concluding chapter of Sociological Reasoning shows again that his philosophical reflections on

empirical practice in the social sciences always co-existed with that practice without his

accepting Popper‟s claim to have found the universal criterion for distinguishing between

metaphysical and empirical theories. Passeron helpfully describes the character of telephone

directories to distinguish between „data‟ (raw information), „knowledge effects‟(systematic

reorganisation of data) and „intelligibility effects‟ (deduction of „meaning‟ from reorganised

data). Intelligibility requires interpretation and obliges sociology to accept that its explanations

are embedded in history. Passeron claims that it was the sense in the emergent social sciences in

the 19th

Century that „any interpretation goes‟ just as, in literary criticism, any interpretation of a

poem or a novel is possible, that caused the development of alternative strategies for presenting

intelligibility. Social scientists either sought to identify the meanings of actions articulated by

social actors or to extrapolate „structural‟ explanations. Passeron seems to be implying that

Bourdieu‟s post-1972 post-structuralism was a misguided attempt simultaneously to use

structuralism to disclose indigenous agency (by the device of „epistemological breaks‟) and then

to present the structuralist perspective as itself the product of agency. In an important paragraph

on page 11, Passeron implicitly rejects the route taken by Bourdieu in Esquisse d’une théorie de

la pratique (Bourdieu, 1972, [1977]). Instead, Passeron insists that sociology must deploy

typologies in order to interpret data but must constantly test the validity of those typologies as an

intrinsic part of the research process. As Passeron puts it: “... a social science must accept that

statement of this meaning in the conceptual language of typological generalities can never be

dissociated from the empirical indexation of the comparative operations that produce it”. (p. 11).

At the back of this disagreement (not specified) with Bourdieu lies their divergent

understandings of the work of Max Weber. Bourdieu‟s discussions of Weber at the time when

he was formulating his „post-structuralist‟ move (Bourdieu, 1971c, [1987] and 1971d, [1991b])

follow the criticisms of Weber made phenomenologically by Schutz in arguing that Weber‟s

„ideal-types‟ imposed meaningful intentions on the actions of social agents which distorted their

„real‟ intentions. Bourdieu pursued the quest for real intention whereas Passeron claimed that

Weberian methodology remained acceptable as long as „ideal-types‟ are deployed simply as

provisional devices for generalising from particular facts - devices which are subjected to

continuous rational checking in relation to those facts.

Chapter 11 is Passeron‟s preface to François Chevaldonné‟s La communication inégale : l’accès

aux media dans les campagnes algériennes [Unequal communication : access to media in the

rural areas of Algeria]. Chevaldonné was a mature research student who had spent thirteen years

as an expert on audio-visual media in the Maghreb before spending a further nine years as a

teacher-researcher in the same field. The research for his thesis was undertaken in 1970-1, that

is to say, a decade after Algeria‟s acquisition of independence. Passeron welcomes

Chevaldonné‟s study because it exemplifies the self-correcting interplay between theory and

practice which he considers to define sociological research. It exemplifies the general

contention that “A theory that does not require us constantly to rectify the statements it governs

no longer produces a knowledge of the world: solemnly intoned mantras quickly degenerate into

mechanical refrains”. (p. 2). Chevaldonné is not advancing a partisan view of the transformative

significance of new technologies. His book reports on empirical evidence and, therefore, in

practice explores the claims in respect of the „audio-visual‟ made as „mantras‟ criticised by

Passeron in the essay of 1981 included in Sociological Reasoning as the second half of Chapter

7. However, the title of Passeron‟s preface – „Le sens et la domination‟ – suggests that there is a

sub-textual element. Bourdieu published both “Le sens pratique” and “Les modes de

domination” in 1976 (Bourdieu, 1976a and 1976b). He adopted the title of the former in his

book of 1980 (Bourdieu, 1980) in which he re-visited his earlier Algerian research and he used

the substance of the latter in the English „translation‟ of Esquisse published in 1977 as Outline of

a Theory of Practice (Bourdieu, 1977)11

. Passeron‟s discussion reflects his knowledge of these

texts as well as, particularly in the last section of the chapter, of Bourdieu‟s La Distinction

(Bourdieu, 1979, [1986]). Passeron‟s preface to Chevaldonné correlates with the contemporary

response to La Distinction as it was articulated in the discussion between Passeron and Claude

Grignon which took place in Marseille in 1982 and was finally published in 1989 as Le savant et

le populaire (Grignon & Passeron, 1989). As far as I am aware, this text represents the only

opportunity taken by Passeron to refer to Algeria, and he uses it to highlight, indirectly, three

fallacies in the way in which Bourdieu deployed his earlier Algerian „fieldwork‟. Firstly,

Chevaldonné‟s book demonstrates that sociological research demonstrates that there are

important inequalities with regard to the accessibility of new technologies within Algeria,

whereas Bourdieu‟s work sustains an interest in the unequal relations between colonisers and

colonised. In the interest of keeping alive the values of traditional inter-personalism, Bourdieu

pays little attention to the passage of time between 1960 and 1980 in Algerian affairs and

perpetuates an analysis of the Algerian situation in exclusively social terms without reference to

the impact of technology. Bourdieu is myth-making rather than engaging analytically with the

real situation in Algeria. Secondly, Bourdieu too easily transposes a research framework

developed anthropologically in a colonial society to apply sociologically to the analysis of

mainland France, that is to say that he wrongly operates as if his models of explanation have

universal validity and uses them to impose meaning on situations which deserve analysis in

themselves. Thirdly, Passeron articulates those differences between „populism‟ and

„miserabilism‟ in the analyses of popular culture which he was to discuss in more detail in

debate with Grignon. There had been some defectors from amongst Bourdieu‟s supporters after

the publication of La distinction on the grounds that it appeared to disparage „working-class‟ or

„popular‟ culture ( „culture populaire‟ in both cases). Grignon was amongst the defectors. His

was the populist position which wanted to celebrate the validity of dominated cultures, and he

took the view that Bourdieu‟s „miserabilism‟ was patronising in supposing that popular culture

needed to be assessed by reference to what it lacked rather than in itself. Passeron tries to hold a

middle position whereby he insists that the function of sociology is to analyse „cultural alterity‟

of all kinds without ideological allegiance.

Chapter 12 is based on a research project undertaken by Passeron and Emmanuel Pedler at the

Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence. Passeron announces in the opening sentence the nature of

the problem to be considered: “The variation in levels of appreciation of works of art, and even

more visibly, in the pleasure people take in them, in different periods and cultures, is common

knowledge. Constructing a theory about this variation ... is more difficult.” (p. 1). He proceeds

to differentiate the tasks involved in constructing a sociology of art in comparison with a

sociology of literature in a way which is reminiscent of the discussion in chapter 7 of the

difference between the visual and verbal communication of research findings. Passeron usefully

distinguishes between sociologies of „cultural ideologies‟, sociologies of „consumption‟ and

sociologies of „reception‟. He makes it clear (on p. 3) that he is committed to the latter whereas

Bourdieu and his collaborators in the production of L’Amour de l’art (Bourdieu, Darbel, &

Schnapper, 1966, [1990]) exemplify the reduction of the sociology of art to the sociology of

consumption. Clearly, again, Bourdieu‟s La distinction is in contention and reference should

also be made to Bourdieu‟s “Eléments d‟une théorie sociologique de la perception artistique”

(Bourdieu, 1968, [1968]). Passeron argues that the same distinctions apply in respect to less

„high‟ culture forms, such as photography, and he cites Bourdieu and his collaborators on

photography (Bourdieu, Boltanski, Castel, & Chamboredon, 1965, [1990]. Passeron respects the

work of Roland Barthes “who did much to bring together sociological analysis and semiology

of connotation,...” but who “also did a great deal towards definitively blurring the boundary

between the semiology of communication and the semiology of signification.”. Passeron here,

and elsewhere, praises Luis Prieto for clarifying the necessary demarcation between these

semiologies. Bourdieu had criticised Barthes‟s Système de la mode (Barthes, 1967, [1985] in an

article of 1975 written with Yvette Delsaut: “Le couturier et sa griffe” (Bourdieu & Delsaut,

1975). The difference is that Passeron found Barthes‟s differentiation between sociology and

semiology as discourses of analysis to be inadequate, whereas Bourdieu regarded Barthes‟s

analyses to be too formalistic and insufficiently concerned with the cultural choices of actual

consumers. Again, Passeron makes reference to the work of Panofsky. Bourdieu had translated

Panofsky‟s Gothic Architecture and Scholastic Thought in 1967 and written a „postface‟

(Bourdieu, 1967a). Bourdieu tried to sociologise Panofsky‟s insights about art perception at the

time in “Systèmes d‟enseignement et systèmes de pensée” [systems of education and systems of

thought] (Bourdieu, 1967b, [1971e]) and subsequently in “Sur le pouvoir symbolique”

(Bourdieu, 1977, [in 1991], but these attempts related to an understanding of the social

conditions of artistic production whereas Passeron‟s interest is in the process whereby social

pacts are created between producers and receivers which enable „aesthetic‟ appreciation.

Part IV is devoted to „heuristics‟, that is to say to techniques of enabling people to learn for

themselves, and sociological applications. There are three chapters, the first of which (13) is

undated and, I assume, previously unpublished. Chapters 14 and 15 were first published,

respectively, in 1986 and 1989.

In transferring attention from the different types of cultural analysis discussed in chapter 11 to

the different implications in policy of adopting them, Passeron concentrates initially in Chapter

13 on the relationship between thought and action. By referring to Merton‟s essay on the

„unintended consequences of social action‟ in the third note of the chapter (p. 2, endnote 3, p.

34), Passeron is indicating that he agrees that there is no direct correlation between the socially

conditioned attitudinal dispositions of actors and their actions. In bourdieusian terms, Passeron

suggests that the field of action has autonomy as much as the fields of literature or art. Amongst

a range of „cultural actions‟ which Passeron discusses, he singles out the effects of André

Malraux‟s innovative introduction of „Maisons de la culture‟ in the 1960s, in relation to which

the Centre de Sociologie Européenne had carried out many of its sociological analyses of

culture. It is the job of the social sciences to produce „a knowledge of social or cultural

alterities‟ (p.13) to mitigate the tendency of policy-makers to recommend their culture as the one

legitimate culture.

Chapter 14 takes policy options for increasing literacy as a case-study for examining the issues

associated with cultural action discussed in the previous chapter. Passeron insists that “any

cultural policy that aims to produce even the smallest reduction in functional illiteracy must first

beware of the illusion of believing that the democratisation of a practice as ascetic and rare as

intense reading is a simple matter of increasing the resources available to the poorest audiences.”

(p. 3). The equitable distribution of cultural competencies involves processes which are different

from those adopted in seeking to secure economic redistribution of resources. Cultural change

requires conscious recognition of the existing cultures of those whose situations are thought to

be in need of „improvement‟. At the back of this discussion is Passeron‟s admiration for

Richard Hoggart‟s The Uses of Literacy (Hoggart, 1957). Passeron translated Hoggart‟s work,

publishing it in French in 1970 as La culture du pauvre (Hoggart, ed. Passeron, 1970) and

subsequently invited Hoggart to Marseille in the 1990s for a workshop which led to the

publication in 1999 of Richard Hoggart en France, presented by Passeron – (Passeron, ed.,

1999). Passeron admired Hoggart‟s capacity to understand fully the social implications of the

acquisition of literacy and to represent the „illiterate‟ condition with respect.

In Chapter 15, Passeron examines the transmission of knowledge as a form of cultural

communication. Just as in relation to the development of cultural policy and of strategies for

eradicating illiteracy discussed in the previous chapters, the dissemination of scientific

knowledge involves sensitivity on the part of transmitters to the cultural situations of their

audiences. Scientific knowledges do not possess inherent validity any more than do the

historically dominant forms of „high‟ culture. The traditional assumption of professors that they

are the possessors of unchallengeable knowledge which cannot be subjected to sociological

scrutiny has to be overcome. He quotes Charles Péguy to illustrate the common view within

universities that there is a radical disjunction between the pedagogical processes at „primary‟

and „higher‟ education levels. Passeron opposes the inherent universalism of educational

psychology in favour of sociologically informed „didactics‟, by which he means “ ... research

that subjects a given knowledge to a particular treatment determined by a particular goal, the

transmission of that knowledge in historical, social and psychological conditions that are always

particular”. (p. 5). There is little new here which had not already been expressed in La

Reproduction. Perhaps this essay is included to counter-act retrospectively the way in which the

propositions of that earlier, collaborative work had acquired universal validity, giving the

sociological model of analysis a perceived status comparable with that of the psychological

model. Passeron is issuing a call for a return to analysis of the particular and to openness to the

recognition of historical contingency in pedagogic processes, reaffirming the claims for La

Reproduction which he would want to make, as stated more elaborately in Chapter 4.

In the final Part of Sociological Reasoning, Passeron presents his summary, in 26 propositions,

of the arguments he has advanced through the book by the reproduction of occasional texts. He

gives a short introduction to the propositions, scholia, and definitions in which he gives a

succinct summary of the summa which is to follow. Any attempt on my part to offer a further

summary would be supernumerary. The main point to remember when grappling with the range

of Passeron‟s philosophical references, involving engagement in particular with the work of

Popper, Wittgenstein, von Neurath, Carnap, and many others, is that he is deliberately trying to

establish the claims of social science within the discourse of epistemological philosophy whilst

simultaneously arguing that the criteria of social scientific explanation are not those deployed by

philosophers in establishing epistemological validity in the natural sciences. Passeron tries to

make the case to the philosophers that social science is a science sui generis and he attempts to

spell out the characteristics of this specificity. This involves him in rooting his claims in the

contingent historical practices, either research projects or articles, presented in the book from

which his philosophical position is extrapolated. The form of the book invites a response in the

reader which acknowledges the dialectical relationship between its parts and its summary.

Conclusion.

In 2004, Passeron wrote the preface to the French translation of Howard Becker‟s Writing for

Social Scientists; How to start and finish your thesis, book, or article (Becker, 1986). The title

of his preface was “Ecrire, ré-écrire et dire-vrai en sociologie” [writing, rewriting and truth-

telling in sociology] (Passeron, 2004, [2009], in Becker, 2004). In discussing the relationship of

his thinking to that of Becker, Passeron reaffirms the views expressed in Sociological Reasoning

and, in particular, reiterates that “Sociologists‟ relationship with sociological statements is never

either immediately, or somewhere in the ether of Logic, a „pure‟ relationship with the

sociological truth of these statements” (Passeron, 2004, [2009]. Although he and Becker shared

an interest in the problems of writing in the social sciences, Passeron especially links these

problems to the imprecision of sociological language. Passeron has been consistent in his

interest in the use and abuse of language in „truth-telling‟ in the social sciences. Telling the

truth involves the difficult task of analysing particular situations in their contextual complexity.

It cannot be achieved either by having recourse to a static philosophical criterion of truth nor by

constructing artificial bases for comparative criticism. In Part I of this preface, I attempted to

outline the difference in the development of thinking about the truth claims of social science in

competing Western European intellectual traditions, and in Part II I sought to focus attention on

the divergence between Passeron and Bourdieu within the French tradition. Part III summarised

Sociological Reasoning with a view, in part, to encouraging readers to enquire further into the

nature of this divergence as they define their own position within their own social and

intellectual traditions. As I suggested in the introduction, this is not a pursuit of truth through

judgemental comparison. Rather it is an invitation to readers to locate themselves within

changing circumstances, acknowledging the ways in which earlier thinkers engaged with their

intellectual inheritances and their contemporary situations.

1 For further details about Aron, see chapter 1 of Robbins, D.M., 2011c.

2 In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Yugoslav experiment was regarded as the prime exemplar of

„autogestion‟ [self-development] in political action. See the discussion in Pierre Rosanvallon, 1976. Michel

Rocard embraced the concept and wrote an enthusiastic preface to a book written by an official of the

League of Yugoslav Communists (Drulovic, M., 1973). 3 I have discussed this in more detail in Appendix II, pp. 99-110, of Yearbook I, 2007, PhD research in

progress, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of East London, available electronically at

http://hdl.handle.net/10552/510. 4 Foucault‟s second thesis comprised a translation of the Kant text and a critical commentary on it. The

translation was published in 1964 with just a short extract from Foucault‟s commentary as an introduction

(Kant, 1964). The publication of Foucault‟s commentary was delayed, appearing in French and English

translation in 2008, (Foucault, 2008a&b) 5 For further comparison of the work of Mill and Comte, see Robbins, D.M. (2011a)

6 For further exploration of this point, see Robbins, D.M. (2011b)

7 Compare, for instance, Passeron‟s working paper (not otherwise published) of 1962 of the Centre de

Sociologie Européenne on “La photographie parmi le personnel des usines Renault”(Passeron, 1962) with

Bourdieu‟s “Le paysan et la photographie” (Bourdieu, 1965) and the contributions of Bourdieu and

colleagues to Un art moyen, essai sur les usages sociaux de la photographie (Bourdieu, Boltanski, Castel, &

Chamboredon, 1965, [1990]) with which Passeron was not associated. For further discussion of this

comparison, see Robbins,D.M., 2009. In relation to education, compare Passeron‟s contribution to La

réforme de l’Université (Antoine & Passeron, 1966), entitled « Conservatisme et novation à l‟Université »

(pp. 141-279) with Bourdieu‟s « L‟école conservatrice, les inégalités devant l‟école et devant la culture »

(Bourdieu, 1966c) 8 I attempted to analyse this as a process of incipient reflexivity in Robbins (2007). At that time, I wrote

about co-authored texts as if they were exclusively the work of Bourdieu. It is now clear to me that the

latent reflexivity which I described was to become philosophically ontological in the work of Bourdieu but

philosophically analytical in the work of Passeron. 9 For the purposes of this discussion, I make no attempt to consider the contribution made by J.-C.

Chamboredon to the co-edited text. My apologies to him. 10

For an elaboration of this belief, see Robbins, D.M., 2003. 11 Association of these Passeron and Bourdieu texts is confused by the difficulty of rendering „sens‟ from

French into English. Bourdieu‟s Le sens pratique is translated as „the logic of practice‟ and, here, passeron‟s

„Le sens et la domination‟ is translated as „meaning and domination‟. Arguably, the English translations

would be better in reverse. The difference between the two men would be better encapsulated if Bourdieu‟s

title were translated as „meaningful‟ (sinnhafte Aufbau as in Schutz) practice and Passeron‟s as „logic‟

(logische Aufbau) as in Carnap

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